Antonia Forest fans

I find Peter's Room fascinating partly because I disagree with AF about the wrongness of the Brontes' role-playing, and role-playing in general, but do love the way she uses it to explore all the children's characters, particularly Peter and Patrick. I wrote a long post about this ages ago, which I am too lazy to summarise.

I think the stuff about the Brontes is partly there so as to suggest the pitfalls AF sees in roleplaying, but it works because it is interesting anyway, and as a plausible reason for Ginty to propose the Gondal. Maybe now a group of teenagers might think of this anyway, but perhaps it was less obvious in 1961.

And I can't help believing that AF herself must have been able to be swept away by her own fantasies, to be able to write about it as she does.