Finding Antonia

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

DandyinChina mentioned, on a thread over at *Esther's Term,* final chapter, that A. Forest is completely obscure in Germany but a friend whose literary tastes she liked had recommended her. I wondered how everyone else found Antonia, who isn't blazingly famous (as she deserves to be) even in the English-speaking world. Certainly I have never met a single American who has read her works, except people to whom I recommended them.

Here's my story. I was in London in 1971, aged 12, with my parents. They deposited me at Foyles for, as I recall, several hours, while they did other business in town. They said that I could choose five books. I had a long time to consider, and chose Ruth Arthur's *A Candle in her Room,* Brian Fairfax-Lucy and Philippa Peirce's *The Children of the House,* Norah Lofts's *The Story of Maude Reede*, and Antonia Forest's *End of Term*. (I'm forgetting the fifth, but it was good too.) There was a list in the Forest book of all her other works, and over the following years my father would order them from Foyles as my Christmas presents. I found the last ones when I was travelling in England myself, some years later. Now I have a complete set in America (including *Thursday Kidnapping* and the Elizabethan books) and about 1/2 of another set at my Amsterdam apartment, just in case I need a fix while I'm there.

I am proud to have once introduced a scholarly art history article (published in French, Flemish, and English) with a quotation from *Autumn Term,* the one where Tim compares her father and Mrs. Todd as a person who paints vs. a merely "artistic" person. That's why I was so pleased to see him "live" in *Esther's Term.*

Any other stories? Or was Antonia Forest a quite obvious choice for everybody else?

Comments

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Well, for me (and I love the idea you've also read A Candle In Her Room - I was a huge Ruth M. Arthur fan) it was school: Falconer's Lure was in the 12-and-unders section. Once hooked, I looked at the city library and picked up The Players' Boy (which was great because I had already read Trease's Cue For Treason so Shakespeare as a character was a familiar concept) and The Players and the Rebels (which I have a hideous suspicion I relied on for an Oxford entrance question where I was a bit light on your actual facts, so I was chucking in every snippet of background I could think of to make myself look bright, from Sellar and Yeatman to Machiavelli - or, as Lieutenant Foley so devastatingly put it; making a pint of knowledge fill a hogshead of ignorance)and Autumn Term and End of Term and Peter's Room; then I smashed my ankle in a riding accident at 13 and fetched up on a sofa for six weeks, during which I read anything I could get my paws on, including The Cricket Term which had just been published - my stamp was the first on the library form inside the pristine front cover, something which I'm sure Nicola would have appreciated. Anyway, I not only took to cricket on the strength of it (I'd not understood the scoring before) but I read anything Nicola was depicted as willingly reading in the text - Mary Renault, Hornblower, Thackeray etc all complete and demanded every single book we could get hold of which Forest had written or was writing as birthday or Christmas (I only read The Thursday Kidnapping once, a library borrowing)

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I was a teenaged Anglophile, and because of making a friend who moved from Yorkshire to my town in the states aged twelve or so, I read some British books that I otherwise wouldn't have encountered until I came over as an adult - the Malory Towers series and some Arthur Ransome are the main ones I remember. Oh, and Adrian Mole - I tasted Lucozade solely because of him!

I somehow ended up with a copy of End of Term (Faber reprint) - not sure when, but my list of books I've read goes back to 1993 and it isn't on there, so I must have read it before that. I first came to the UK in 1990, so it's possible that I bought it over here, or that it had simply been randomly available at a book sale in the states. But it didn't seem to inspire me to track down anything else by her, as I never read any other Forests until last week. glitterboy1 used the first sentence of Autumn Term in a quiz, and I'd already decided that having plowed through about 45 of the Chalets I'd take a break, and I have access to all the Forests (though not lending copies, sadly), so I'm partway through the second book.

[coughingbear]

I loved school stories, particularly the Chalet School, and used to get a lot of them from the second-hand books at local jumble sales. Cricket Term in the Puffin edition was on one of those stalls, and it looked like my kind of book, so I bought it, and read it, and then immediately read it again. I was completely hooked. The style, the characters, the hints at previous stories, the cricket match, Nicola being a Thackeray person not Dickens, the references to Murder Must Advertise (which I had read) and other authors that I hadn't, but immediately wanted to seek out.

Then set out to collect the other Forests, which was easyish with the ones Puffin had published, and difficult with the others, though the two Players books were in our local library. I think I was the only person who borrowed them for years. Thursday Kidnapping I didn't read until a few years ago, though I have my own copy now.

I didn't know anyone else who'd read her until I got online and discovered the Girlsown list. I'd recommended her to a few people, but I only knew one other person who admitted to reading anything labelled as a 'school story' and my proselytising was unsuccessful.

[the_antichris.livejournal.com]

I was nine or so, and I loved the Chalet School, so when I came across Autumn Term and End of Term in the library in the small town where my grandma lived, I grabbed them, adored them and promptly forgot the titles, the author and anything about them except the knife with sixteen blades and the Christmas Play. And of course no other NZ library had them on display (I'm still surprised they were in the Pukekohe library), so for ten years I mourned my lovely, lost school series. Then someone caught me reading Farm School books at uni; I was embarrassed until he asked if I'd read Antonia Forest; I said I didn't think so; he lent me Autumn Term and GLEE.

[senji.livejournal.com]

I blame ankaret :-)

I've only read Autumn Term so far though — that being all that Cambridge County Library have.

[minniemoll.livejournal.com]

I don't remember reading them for the first time, or which one I read first. The local libraries had a full set (I think) between them - during term time I'd read the ones the library up the road had, during school holidays I'd cycle round the rest trying to get hold of the others (this was during the early 1980s). I had the Puffin pbs of the school stories, I think that Cricket Term was the only one I bought new, which is ironic as that was the one which fell to pieces (I've had several copies that did that, it must have been the glue).

The libraries had very few other school stories*, so AF must have been held in high regard.

*with the exception of the central library, which had loads of hb Chalets, which were catalogued as 'shelved in basement' but in reality lived, in a slightly shameful way, on a trolley next to the issue desk, in a sort of limbo - not shelved with the real books, but very popular....

[(Anonymous)]

I first came across her in one of those anthologies of school stories, when I was about 10. It's only more recently that I've realised how strange it was that her writing was included in an anthology published around 1990. The "story" was the first chapter of Autumn Term, which impressed me enough to seek out the rest of the book. The school library only had Autumn Term and The Cricket Term, and like everyone else they inspired me to try Mary Renault and Thackeray and Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae.

Rather uncommonly, my local library (in NZ) had all the Antonia Forest books, including the Elizabethan ones, and I regularly got them out. Probably I was the only one though, because last time I checked they'd been moved to the stacks. Maybe they've been sold off, now.

[forester48.livejournal.com]

Falconer's Lure was the first one I read when I was about nine or so and I must have read and re-read the first few ones from the library because I didn't own any until I was in my twenties. I remember starting to collect them as an adult and it not being easy even in the 70s.

Shameful memory - I could not get hold of a copy of Ready Made Family so I borrowed a copy from the local library and then pretended to lose it. Worst of all they would not take more than a nominal fine although I pleaded with them to let me pay the full cost of the book.

Until I went on the web and found other fans I really did think I was one of a tiny minority of readers. I've never met anyone who's ever heard of Antonia Forest let alone read her books. I could never understand why they weren't more critically acclaimed and popular.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Read Autumn Term aged 10 and vastly disliked it. Re-introduced to Forest a couple of years ago by a fellow Children’s Lit. fan, I discovered that I really like the other books, but am still not sold on Autumn Term. If only I had read a different one first – for one thing, I’d have discovered Renault and Sayers much sooner, too.