I have tried and failed about three times to articulate why I feel that those opening sections are so important. I am now giving up, but I might try and come back to it. Certainly AF in general made me think more deeply than anything else I read as a teenager, with the exception of some of Chaim Potok, and an odd little book called 'I, Juan de Pareja', about the moral valency of art, and of what kind of troubling relation their might be (to be pompous) between art and virtue, both for the artist and the reader. (Northanger Abbey might have done this too but I read it a good deal later; actually re: adolescent girls 'The Rainbow' is very good on this too, Ursula in her hay loft thrilling to 'Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat'.)

I only actually got hold of 'Peter's Room' in quite late adolescence, but it certainly fitted with, and expanded upon, thought prompted by what I had already read of her.

I had an imaginary world myself as a child, but a solitary one, and rather different from the Gondal version - more in the line of endless maps and law acts and treaties and graphs of language distribution (seriously!). I did the accounts for my vast and populous country every Saturday morning for quite some time, and occasionally wrote speeches to deliver to my cabinet . . . (I don't know why I'm admitting all this. I'm going to stop right now.)