Published: August 2007.
The book has:
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Approximately 200 pages
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Six specially created maps and charts
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Over 30 illustrations, one taken by Antonia Forest herself and most of the others commissioned for the book; the six colour pages include a spread showing the covers of the various editions of all AF’s books
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A transcript of one of AF’s letters to the author, plus a facsimile of the first page.
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Detailed ‘cast lists’
Sue Sims, Antonia Forest's literary executor, has written the Introduction, at the end of which she says: 'Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay this book is that, reading it before publication, I kept thinking: "Oh-why didn't I think of that?" Insight, wit and love - they make for a fascinating volume.'
Interest in Antonia Forest's work has if anything increased since her death in November 2003. 'Forest fans poured out of the woodwork following AF's death,' Anne says at the beginning of the book, and this has been demonstrated by the demand for the GGBP reprints (The Player's Boy is still available from GGBP; we shall be publishing the sequel, The Players and the Rebels, early in 2008 - please do not order this yet; for details of where to buy other titles please click here).
Anne Heazlewood was one of the discriminating readers who persisted in admiring the Forest books throughout the era of 'kitchen-sink realism' when they were banned by some libraries for being politically incorrect. She had discovered the earlier books in her youth and went on to collect the rest of the Forest canon as it appeared.
Later, and by then herself an established author of children's and other books, she conducted a lengthy correspondence with Antonia Forest in which they discussed not only the latter's books but also many other topics. Anne wrote and subsequently sent to the author a study of her Marlow books, and, although she was careful to say that she did not expect any answer, she was delighted when in due course Antonia Forest replied in great detail. However, the book was never published commercially.
The Marlows and their Maker: a companion to the series by Antonia Forest is a completely revised and expanded edition of that original work. Anne presents a study of the books-the plots, the characters, the real and fictional geography-putting them into the context of the different times at which they were created, and incorporates all AF's comments on and criticisms of the original work.
She has also provided a fascinating survey of the books which the Marlows themselves read, and extremely detailed cast lists of both the modern and the historical characters (not forgetting the animals!). The appendices include a farewell tribute, updated from the one which Anne wrote for Folly when Antonia Forest died, and a revised version of Margot Louis's article
'Stars, Sharpened by the Coming Frost: The Marlow Series and the Forest Chill' which also originally appeared in that journal and which Professor Louis has expanded for this book.
Most of the book's copious illustrations have been specially commissioned; they include photographs of many of the real places mentioned in the Marlow series, together with those known or thought to have inspired the fictional ones, and a map giving the known geography of all the books. There are also portraits of the historical figures who feature in the two Elizabethan titles, and a map of the London of that era.
The six colour pages include a spread showing the various editions of all the Forest works. Anne Heazlewood has provided several charts as well as two maps which show her own ideas of the fictional geography of both Kingscote and Trennels.