Why have Forest’s books been neglected?

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I don’t think any thread has directly addressed this: just why have such brilliant books languished out of print, with Antonia Forest hardly known in her lifetime, while lesser authors have taken the limelight?

 

The only explanation I’ve seen is that she was perceived as upper class and elitist, when the fashion was all for “sordid realism” (the Marlows and their Maker).  But I wonder.  Growing up in the 1970s and 80s I don’t remember much gritty realism, but library shelves bulging with KM Peyton’s Flambards, Noel Streatfeilds and a sprinkling of Diana Wynne Jones…Even that ultra cool American Harriet the Spy had a nanny and a cook, for goodness sake.

 

I think any explanation has to cover two parts: the child reader and the children’s book establishment.  My thoughts are these:

 

1)       For child readers, AF is hard.  I found AF substantially harder (though ultimately more rewarding) than Noel Streatfeild, for example, and Kingscote a much tougher place to understand than the Chalet School.  AF’s historicals in particular were way harder than contemporaries such as Barbara Willard or Rosemary Sutcliffe.  In practise, this sophistication of language and content means her child fan base was likely to be confined to a narrow group of very advanced, probably girl readers.  Add to that, the books weren’t coming out very regularly.  For these reasons, it was hard for a body of child fans to build up and provide the word-of-mouth momentum to keep the books in print (regardless of the views of adult librarians and critics) in the way that happened with the Chalet School or Ruby Ferguson’s Jill pony books.

2)       For the adult literary establishment, I suspect its the fact that they are genre novels – rather than upper class - that is key.  Critics and prize judges despise genre in children’s books and adults’ alike – and AF’s novels are school stories and family adventure stories (with pony elements too).  I think some of AF’s deeper themes (to adult eyes) such as death and religion are more easily overlooked for being sandwiched into stories concerned with netball or cricket. (It would be interesting to know how they were reviewed at the time – if at all.  And of course the adult readers should have registered the fact that the quality of the writing about cricket was absolutely excellent!)

 

I still can’t quite understand it – after all, we love the books!  I’d love to hear what people think about this.

 

Comments

[stripydinosaur.livejournal.com]

I definitely think that the huge gap between the first and the last book contributed to their neglect - after all, the target audience for Autumn Term would be grown up by Run Away Home. I discovered them in my school library in 1991, and I know I was the only person to ever take them out!!

[geebengrrl.livejournal.com]

I, uh, 'liberated' the Ready Made Family from my school library. I was the only person to take them out since the 1970s (this was 1990)

[stripydinosaur.livejournal.com]

Well done!! I regret hugely not 'liberating' them from mine; years later I paid huge amounts of money for copies and I am certain that the school copies are either still there moldering gently, or were thrown away....

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

antfan - I think you've got some strong points, but you do need to understand the sheer extent and scale of the self-hatred among those members of the children's literature establishment who formed their views after about 1965. They really are riddled with an intense embarrassment and shame at the fact that they were born to privilege, and want to show their solidarity with those they see as an oppressed class at every turn. The one thing they hate most is being reminded of where they came from, and AF does that. Peyton is probably a One Nation Tory: certainly the Flambards TV series was slanted way to the Left of the books (but then one of its writers was an unapologetic Marxist) and I have always thought that she changed the ending to an ideologically conservative one in 'Flambards Divided' because she disliked the way Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow had interpreted her work, with Mark realising the need to accept radical change and Dick talking about how "we" (i.e. the poor) "deserve" to own the land (none of which is in the books).

School stories (and, of course, Enid Blyton) were hated by two different generations of critics for two different reasons: the first lot hated them because they saw them of being of limited literary merit, but then the 1960s generation came along and hated them for ideological reasons (and at the same time hated the "superior" books that the first generation of Blyton-haters had championed). AF's school stories were never "commended" for the Carnegie Medal, but her earlier non-school books were. The turning point, politically, was probably when 'The Owl Service' won, 40 years ago now (!) ... after that, AF could never have recovered what critical standing she had acquired.

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

The turning point, politically, was probably when 'The Owl Service' won, 40 years ago now (!) ... after that, AF could never have recovered what critical standing she had acquired.

Interesting... could you fill me in on this turning point? I read 'The Owl Service', but too long ago to figure out how it could have turned the political tide.

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

My guess is that (2) is the main reason why AF didn't receive more literary acclaim: as you muse, literary critics are an uppity bunch, and looking for literary merit in a series of boarding school stories (sniff!) isn't exactly their style.

As for (1), I'd say the sophistication of her work is the reason why AF's work hasn't ever sold as well as, say, Enid Blyton's. EB's work covers more or less the same genres (boarding school and upper class children's adventure stories) and has been phenomenally successful despite its denunciation by critics. My take on this is that EB is much more accessible: whatever people say about her literary merit, EB is a great storyteller and keeps things simple, digestible and pacy. AF's work is dense and nuanced and references all manner of weighty subjects in a complex way. Having grown up with St Clare's and Malory Towers, I read my first AF at 12 and immediately preferred this, but when I tried passing AF to a friend who also loved EB's school stories (and was easily smart and sophisticated enough to manage AF), she didn't take to them at all, because she didn't want complexity in a school story - she wanted escapism.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

That much is true. AF works on a higher level than much of her theoretical target audience: we have to accept this.

The same applies to writers such as William Mayne, but of course *they* are (maybe were in Mayne's case since his imprisonment) immensely critically revered because they don't have the baggage that middle-class liberal guilt trips on (OK, maybe the Cathedral Quartet *does*, but that doesn't seem to have been venerated by the new school of critics, who have always seen it as a rather primitive early work).

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of it has to do with the genre issue. Had all of the Marlows books been Kingscote books, I think she would have been much better known. But having the series covering a whole range of genres probably made them harder to market.

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and didn't actually come across her novels until 1980, when I was at university. The bookshops and libraries were full of Enid Blyton, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Malcolm Saville, Nancy Drew, etc - but no Antonia Forest. I did, however, grow up in the Birmingham area, and apparently AF's books were banned from Birmingham libraries, so that probably explains her absence a little. I was introduced to AF at university - it was recommended to me by a friend, for whom Autumn Term was recommended reading on the librarianship course she was doing. (As you can see, we weren't at university in Birmingham ... )

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Where were you at university, out of interest?

[nemosed.livejournal.com]

They were *banned*? Whatever for?

On the other hand, the public libraries where I grew up didn't have any Enid Blyton, on the basis of lack of literary merit. I was never entirely convinced by this argument, since apparently "Babysitter's Club" and "Goosebumps" books met their highbrow requirements. Presumably the real difficulty with Blyton would be all those outdated politically incorrect notions.

[(Anonymous)]

The almost universal theory is that books about children are for children, books about adults are for adults. Very few exceptions - Frost in May, Cat among the Pigeons (Christie), one or two of Rumer Godden's, but it's very hard to write a book about children and have it categorised in the adult section.

Maybe AF's books were mislabelled. They are not children's books. Even the ones with the obvious children's-book plots (school stories, Marlows & Traitor) are far more well-written than the Blyton/Brent-Dyer/Streatfeild genre, and several of the others could easily be transferred across the shelves to the adult section of the bookcase.

Example - if "Ready Made Family" had been written from Karen's point of view, but otherwise identical, can you doubt it would be in the adult section?

Example 2 - Patrick & Jukie' ride in "Thuggery Affair" - kid's lit? hardly.

Example 3 - Nicola, and then Rowan, on the beach in "Run Away Home" - it's a long long way from Meg Cabot.

Here's my [heretical?] conclusion - AF was NOT a writer of children's books!

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

Above comment was by me.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am inclined to agree that this is a factor, if not necessarily the whole story. I didn’t like Forrest as a child, though I was certainly reading books as difficult, or containing references I didn’t understand and so on, at the age at which I picked up “Autumn Term” and put it down again*. Had Forrest been writing today, she might have had more luck, given that the ‘crossover book’ has become trendy and the journalistic flavour of the month. This applies to another children’s book of the early 80s, now out of print Lionel Davidson’s utterly bizarre and hallucinogenic “Under Plum Lake”, which has the most heart-breaking ending of any book I’ve ever read, and which I simply cannot imagine most children being able to comprehend emotionally.

*Mind you I'm still not a big fan of Autumn Term. The Marlows and the TRaitor might have had a different outcome.

[geebengrrl.livejournal.com]

I think they didn't come out regularly enough. Arthur Ransome, for example, turned out a new Swallows and Amazons every year, in time for christmas. I wonder why her publishers kept publishing her - if she wasn't very popular, she presumably wasn't making much money for them.

I am intruigued by the comment above that her books were banned in Birmingham (I want that on a tshirt, by the way) - could this be a symptom that a large number of adults perhaps thought the books were unsuitable in some way? Given that at the times she was publishing, parents would have exercised much more influence over which books were bought?

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Her publishers seemed to value her - I read somewhere that they always intended to publish the final Marlow she was writing (if she'd finished it). And they looked at - and published - Tim Kennemore's novels on her recommendation. Perhaps quality really counted back then, whereas now, sadly, I doubt she'd be published past book 3, as sales count for everything.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Thinking about the audience for other school stories, most of them are a fair bit younger than the children in the books - kids have often grown out of Enid Blyton long before getting to age 11-13 when Malory Towers characters etc are introduced. Whereas a 7-9-year-old really isn't going to grasp the subtle characterisation in AF's school stories.

The AF school stories got reprinted in the mid 80s, which led to my buying Autumn Term just after being hit with the bombshell "by the way, we're moving abroad and you're going to boarding school next year - pick one of these three". I didn't really get Autumn Term, but realised it was a lot more realistic than Blyton, the Chalet School, or even Trebizon which was at least up to date, so ending up buying the other three, and over a few re-reads, realising that they told me a lot more about human nature than any other books I owned at the time (ie before I'd acquired various 'young adult' books, where I think AF would fit well if it weren't for the backwards snobbery that well-off people don't have 'issues' to deal with).

I think there's a place for a modern series of children's books about boarding school life in the wake of Harry Potter. But books about children that actually are aimed at adults are very rare. It's odd - I always felt boarding school was the whole world in a small space, just like Miss Marple says about St Mary Mead - the whole of human nature is in a village, which is why she's an expert on it.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

I'm writing a series of contemporary boarding-school books, the first of which will be published by Bettany Press in June/July-ish this year. Ju's plan is to approach an agent with them down the track to try to get them into the mainstream market. However, we both feel a lot will need to change if that is to happen, as the children's market is very restricted at the moment.

It's YA and definitely aimed at older kids, but have you read Sara Lawrence's High Jinx? This too is meant to be the start of a series of boarding-school stories, though it's very different to what has gone before!

[alliekiwi.livejournal.com]

One of the papers I took at University was children's literature. One part of it involved us looking at a book/author and critiquing it for sexism, racism and all the other nasty isms we're not supposed to allow children to encounter to this day.

The professor brought with him a selection of books from the nearby Teachers College library, and lo! AF's books were among them. I just about swallowed my tonsils, and got up a full rant about how good those books were. No-one else in had even heard of AF and I'm certain they were all quite prepared to believe in the Evils of Those Books purely at the Prof's say-so.

The Prof certainly had it in for school stories, though.

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

Class in children's literature does seem to be a particular hang-up in the UK. AF is writing about the upper middle class with gentry connections, and I'm sure that I would not agree with all her opinions, but it does seem a shame to virtually ban her for that, particularly as I'm sure that Waugh for example is still widely read (although I didn't do him at University). I think I do remember the school stories being re-issued as a kind of Trebizon series in the eighties by Penguin but not really taking off, mainly because they are not a kind of Trebizon series, and hard to follow completely if you have not read the "at home" books. When I was working in a school I remember reading an essay stating that the high frequency of reading problems in children of working class origin was because they are given books that they cannot identify with, which I thought was essentially rubbish, and still do, but as a general theory seems to have been pretty influential in teaching circles. Maybe Harry Potter has changed all this somewhat, but rather sadly too late for AF, who does seem to have suffered from a combination of prejudice against series fiction and political correctness.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

I would hope that Harry Potter has knocked on the head all vestiges of the theory that children can't identify with characters outside their own experience. I'm sure quite a lot of his readers aren't wizards who go to boarding school???

Actually, I never did really understand why people who live fairly drab lives in the middle of cities where nothing very exciting happens, would want to read about other people living fairly drab lives in the middle of cities where nothing very exciting happens. Have these reviewers never heard of escapism?

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

I would agree with you that there is nothing wrong with a bit of escapism, and exposing children to ways of living that are perhaps a little, or more than a little, different from their own, but I have to say that I used to live in London and it was pretty exciting with quite a lot happening. My objection to identification being used to explain reading difficulties is related to my general belief that they are more likely to be related to teaching methods, but I do think that it is a positive thing to expose children to a range of reading in which they express some interest, or show interest with a little encouragement.

[alliekiwi.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that there are some children who plain will not read a book - any book. I've had a few of those in my class before, back when I was teaching.

I had two boys in particular, in Form Two, who were absolutely obessed with basketball - american basketball teams in particular. The school rule was that in silent reading time (straight after lunch, for ten minutes) no magazines were allowed to be read, only books. I finally got the okay from my senior teacher that if those two boys read one book (they got to choose one out of a list of 3: I am David, The Hatchet and I can't remember what the third one was) then they could read basketball magazines during silent reading for the rest of the year.

The book both boys chose was 'I am David'. I think because it looked shorter than the other two.

One of them slogged away at it, and even read some over the school hols to get it out of the way. He finished it, answered some questions to prove he'd read it, and then happily read his magazines. He actually admitted he'd quite enjoyed the story.

The other boy seethed, refused to read, was incredibly disruptive and then got all self-righteously indignant that the other boy got to read magazines and he didn't, and why not???

This boy, aged 13, truely believed that one day a scout for the Chicago Bulls was going to see him walking down the street in our small town of 4,000 people and want him to come play for the team. Considering this is New Zealand and nowhere near where the Chicago Bulls hang out, it was a complete fantasy. Now I understand most people have dreams like that, but there is - generally - a slight inkling in their heads that it is a dream and highly unlikely to happen. This boy was completely and positively certain it was going to happen.

Should we just have let him read his magazines?

Bearing in mind that he was already allowed to read and use basketball information for his personal project, so it wasn't as if the subject was totally forbidden during shcool hours? (The children, in any spare time they had, worked on their own personal encyclopaedia on a subject of their choice, be it guinea pigs, racism, basketball etc etc)

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

I admit that I haven't met this boy, but are you sure that he didn't just have difficulty with reading? Magazines have photographs, pictures etc and it is usually easier to guess from context. Maybe we are getting a bit off topic here though.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can always equate lack of interest in books with difficulty with reading. My mother has only read one book (Anne of Green Gables) voluntarily in her life, because she says that sitting down for hours with a book bores her. She doesn't have any difficulty with the actual reading - her reading was fine at school and when my father lost his sight a few years before he died, she used to read books to him (mainly biographies of sports people that hadn't made it onto audio for some reason). But for her, sitting reading a book is about as interesting as sitting knitting or sewing is to me.

One of the mums I know through my son's swimming lessons has a teenage daughter who also finds reading a bore. She's a high-achieving teenager on a scholarship and intends to be a surgeon. She will happily read textbooks for homework and school, but never reads voluntarily because she thinks novels are irrelevant/boring.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say - thanks for such a great discussion everyone. Really thought-provoking. I find I've started pondering this whole issue of AF and class as a result ...maybe I'll start a new thread some time.