Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 – 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, an English writer of children's novels. She is known for the Marlow series. Life 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 World War II, she worked at an Army Pay Office. From 1938 until her death, Forest lived in Bournemouth and Dorset. By 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 a prolific letter writer, frequently corresponding 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. Marlow series Forest is known for the Marlow 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. ‡ "Twins' Form" refers to the school stages of twins Nicola and Lawrie. The Marlows' world is unusually fully described. The school stories feature the talented protagonists' wide-ranging interests and the strengths and weaknesses of members of their circle. Forest's books were later noted for their technique in Richmal Crompton's 1965 story William and the Pop Singers: placing characters created in an earlier age, and still are essentially tied to that past time, in a different world several decades later. The same characters who initially recount their childhood experiences of the London Blitz watch Up Pompeii! and make themselves up as punks when they are 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 opposition to changes in Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council. Forest indicated she was working on a successor to Run Away Home, but no manuscript was found among her papers after her death in 2003. Forest also wrote The Player's Boy (1970) and The Players and the Rebels (1971) about the Marlows' ancestors in Shakespeare's time. Reception The Thursday Kidnapping (1963) was Forest's only book not about the Marlows and the