Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 - 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of a British children's author who was christened Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein (her real name was not made public during her life). Born of part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents, she grew up in Hampstead, London, and was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College, London.
It could be said that she embraced the way of life of the upper middle classes of the English shires with the zeal of the convert. From 1938 until her death she lived in Bournemouth, and from the end of 1946 onwards she was a devout Catholic; she would eventually sum herself up as "middle-aged, narrow-minded, anti-progressive AND PROUD OF IT". Most of her books are concerned with the Marlow family, an ancient landed family whose patriarch is a Royal Navy commander (later captain), and whose six daughters (out of eight children in all) all go to Kingscote, a boarding school where all the Marlow books with "Term" in the title are set. The complete list of modern-day Marlow books is below, with their setting in the school career of Nicola and Lawrie (twins).
| Book | Publication Year | Setting | Twins' Form | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Autumn Term | 1948 | Autumn term | Third Form | ||
| The Marlows and the Traitor | 1953 | Easter holidays | Third Form | ||
| Falconer's Lure | 1957 | Summer holidays | Third Form | ||
| End of Term | 1959 | Autumn term | Lower Fourth | ||
| Peter's Room | 1961 | Christmas holidays | Lower Fourth | ||
| The Thuggery Affair | 1965 | Spring half-term | Lower Fourth | ||
| The Ready-Made Family | 1967 | Easter holidays | Lower Fourth | ||
| The Cricket Term | 1974 | Summer term | Lower Fourth | ||
| The Attic Term | 1976 | Autumn term | Upper Fourth | ||
| Run Away Home | 1982 | Christmas holidays | Upper Fourth | ||
She also wrote The Player's Boy (1970) and The Players and the Rebels (1971), which concern themselves with the ancestors of the Marlows in Shakespeare's time, and an unrelated present-day (at the time) story, The Thursday Kidnapping (1963), the only one of her books to have been published in America [Coward-McCann, 1965].
Antonia Forest's later books are notable for their use of a technique perhaps taken to its ultimate extreme by Richmal Crompton in her 1965 story William and the Pop Singers; namely the placing of characters who were created in an earlier age, and still seem essentially tied to that past time, in a very different world several decades later. So the same characters who initially recount their childhood experiences of the London Blitz eventually watch Up Pompeii! and, later still, make themselves up as punks, when they are only a few years older. The 1976 book The Attic Term is notable for its use of the teenage character Patrick Merrick to express the writer's personal opposition to changes in the Roman Catholic Church resulting from the Second Vatican Council.
Antonia Forest never completed the successor to Run Away Home and no manuscript was found amongst her papers after her death [1].
After many years out of print, her books have gradually been returning to the public eye with a Faber reprint of Autumn Term in 2000 followed by Girls Gone By Publishers reprints of Falconer's Lure, Run Away Home and The Marlows and the Traitor during 2003, The Ready-Made Family and Peter's Room in 2004, and The Thuggery Affair in 2005. The Player's Boy was reprinted by Girls Gone By Publishers in 2006, The Players and the Rebels in 2008, and The Thursday Kidnapping in 2009.