Antonia Forest

Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 – 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, an English writer. She wrote 13 books for children, published between 1948 and 1982. Her ten best-known works concern the doings of the fictional Marlow family. Several are school stories.

Life Forest was born to part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents on 26 May 1915.

From 1938 until her death in 2003, Forest lived in Bournemouth.

Forest corresponded with her readers and with literary figures such as GB Stern. The Attic Term uses the teenage character Patrick Merrick to express Forest's opposition to changes in Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council. It was a commended runner-up for the Library Association's Carnegie Medal, for the year's best children's book by a British subject. Two Marlow books were also commended runners-up for the medal: Falconer's Lure and Peter's Room, for 1957 and 1961 respectively. and from Alison Shell, who has studied Forest's theme of recusant Catholicism.

The Marlow books also featured in Lucy Mangan's 2012 memoir of favourite childhood reading. Mangan chose the first Marlow book as one of her top picks for a children's library, saying of the series: 'they are dense and complex books, but among the most fulfilling reads I think a child can have. When I first came across C.S. Lewis's adage, "I read to know that I am not alone", it was the Marlows I thought of'.

Emma Donoghue has called the books "an extraordinarily subtle portrait of an eight-child English family, full of complex moments of resentment and alliance".

Reissues

All of Forest's books, initially published by Faber, went out of print for several decades.