I do wonder whether she was making a subtle feminist statement with Peter and Nicola
Is this - trying to think of textual evidence! - something that shifts over the course of the books? Because massive social changes around possibilities for women over the period: at the beginning just being a Wren ('typing in uniform') would probably have been seen as quite a radical choice of career, but things are definitely shifting in the later episodes - e.g. Jan Scott going into her ?uncle's law firm not as a secretary but to be a proper solicitor in the family firm. But feel that there is a long tradition in Eng lit, esp possibly YA lit, of girls feeling excluded from the career possibilities open to their brothers and brothers feeling ambivalent about the family business, whatever that is - e.g. in Yonge's The Daisy Chain, there's an unspoken assumption that Norman, who turns pale and faint at the sight of blood, is automatically going to be successor in family medical practice (and this causes one of the many crises de conscience among the May siblings). (And one wishes Ethel had gone to London Medical School for Women...)
no subject
Is this - trying to think of textual evidence! - something that shifts over the course of the books? Because massive social changes around possibilities for women over the period: at the beginning just being a Wren ('typing in uniform') would probably have been seen as quite a radical choice of career, but things are definitely shifting in the later episodes - e.g. Jan Scott going into her ?uncle's law firm not as a secretary but to be a proper solicitor in the family firm. But feel that there is a long tradition in Eng lit, esp possibly YA lit, of girls feeling excluded from the career possibilities open to their brothers and brothers feeling ambivalent about the family business, whatever that is - e.g. in Yonge's The Daisy Chain, there's an unspoken assumption that Norman, who turns pale and faint at the sight of blood, is automatically going to be successor in family medical practice (and this causes one of the many crises de conscience among the May siblings). (And one wishes Ethel had gone to London Medical School for Women...)