Antonia Forest

Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 – 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, an English writer of children's novels whose real name was not made public during her lifetime. She is best known for the Marlow series.

Forest was born to part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents on 26 May 1915. She grew up in Hampstead, London, and was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College, London, where she studied journalism. During the Second World War she worked at an Army Pay Office.

It could be said that she embraced the way of life of the upper middle classes of the English shires with the zeal of the convert. From 1938 until her death she lived in Bournemouth, Dorset, and from the end of 1946 she was a Roman Catholic. Eventually she called herself "middle-aged, narrow-minded, anti-progressive AND PROUD OF IT".

Forest was an enthusiastic letter-writer, corresponding both with her readers and literary figures such as GB Stern. She never married, and for many years supported herself by renting out part of her house in Bournemouth.

Forest's best known work is a series of novels featuring one contemporary generation of the Marlows, an ancient landed family whose patriarch is a Royal Navy commander (later captain). Among eight children, all six daughters go to Kingscote, a boarding school where the four books named after school "Terms" are set.

The series mingles genres, meaning the world of the Marlows is unusually fully described. The school stories particularly move beyond the normal constraints of the form, due to the wide-ranging interests of the talented protagonists and the strengths and weaknesses of members of the circle.

Antonia Forest's later books are notable for their use of a technique perhaps taken to its extreme in Richmal Crompton's 1965 story William and the Pop Singers: placing of characters who were created in an earlier age, and still seem essentially tied to that past time, in a very different world several decades later. So the same characters who initially recount their childhood experiences of the London Blitz eventually watch Up Pompeii! and, later still, make themselves up as punks, when they are only a few years older. The 1976 book The Attic Term is notable for its use of the teenage character Patrick Merrick to express Forest's personal opposition to changes in Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council.

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