(no subject)

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Firstly I've got to say how much I'm enjoying Biskybat's fanfic. Enid Blyton is undergoing such a revival at the moment:in the library with my daughter this afternoon she chose a Malory Towers book. I was a bit doubtful as I never liked Enid Blyton, but she wanted it because her friends are all reading them. The shelves were groaning with reissued Blytons with revamped covers. This brings me onto my point - would Antonia Forest be more widely read and in print today, if she had kept her stories in the same time period throughout? (I mean the post-war 40s) Would modern teachers/librarians/children cope with the aspects of Marlow world that they dislike if those aspects could be accepted as part of the period? Plenty of children's classics survive featuring privileged middle class kids with nannys and cooks etc. and the survival of Malory Towers etc. shows that boarding school stories are not a problem. But is the Marlowverse just too much of a problem transposed into the seventies?

Comments

[charverz.livejournal.com]

Yes, but remember that Trennels is out in the country, and at school the Marlows are mixing with urban girls. If Mrs. Bertie and Doris didn't watch telly, they might have been mildly "frozen in time". I remember 30 years ago going to practice law in a little town north of Toronto. I pooh-poohed my father's advice, telling him that "things weren't like that any more", only to find that in Barrie in 1980 - they were!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Mrs Bertie certainly does watch the TV - she mentions going to watch it at her friend's house in the village, and by the end of the series there is a TV at Trennels.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

I could imagine a Mrs. Bertie in the eighties easily enough - basically a 1940's woman who hasn't changed and is quite happy doing the same job she's been doing for 40 years, the "family retainer bit" as Nicola or Peter once put it. She could be well into her seventies, anyway, if she's fit and active and doesn't want to give up. Doris is a bit more unlikely - not many young single women in that sort of job in the eighties.

[charverz.livejournal.com]

But what if we picture Doris as the kind of person who has no head for learning what the schools want, but talented with her hands? But lacking the ambition to go out and make a career of it? She might just decide to go with the Marlows since it's secure and not overly stressful.