“I WON’T,” said Pomona tearfully, “I want to sit here. I think you’re beastly. . .”

Thus the voice of injured youth echoing through the cloisters of the girls’ school story from at least the days of Angela Brazil and Bosom Friends or the like. But Antonia Forest, who established herself in that tradition instantaneously with her first book, Autumn Term (1948), turned its conventions into narratives of greater depth and subtlety. Schoolgirl demotic surfaced only occasionally within dialogues that were the more convincing for being the utterances of credible characters.

Credibility may have been stretched at the opening of Autumn Term when it became clear that no fewer than six of the daughters of Commander Marlow were all travelling to Kingscote School (a sort of Roedean — how could he afford it?). But these six Marlows were to become the staple of Antonia Forest’s writing life. Planning her second book, which was to be a consideration of treachery, she found it helpful to return to characters whom she was getting to know , and The Marlows and the Traitor (1953) persuaded her that they were a family whose activities deserved fuller exploration.

Thus it turned out that eight further volumes chronicled events in the Marlows’ lives. There were three more Kingscote stories: End of Term (1959), The Cricket Term (1974), and The Attic Term (1976), while the other five dealt with holiday adventures and allowed the girls’ two brothers to have a look-in, along with a boy neighbour, Patrick Merrick, who was from an ancient Catholic family.

Antonia Forest also ventured into Marlow/Marlowe genealogy with an historical story set among the Elizabethan stage companies — a work so lengthy that it was divided into two: The Player’s Boy (1970) and The Players and the Rebels (1971). Only one book, The Thursday Kidnapping (1963), did not feature any Marlows, although it was set in Hampstead where they had once lived.

And Hampstead was Antonia Forest’s stamping ground too. She had been born there in 1915 as Patricia Giulia Caulfield Tate Rubinstein, the only child of an émigré Russian father of the Reform Jewish persuasion, who had married an Ulster Protestant. She was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College London, where she took a course in journalism, but did not enter the trade. In 1947 she turned from her father’ s faith (“it struck no roots”) and became a Roman Catholic.

Within that personal experience there are a number of elements which account for the idiosyncrasies that give flavour and originality to her writing. Her love of literature is evident throughout, both in direct references to and quotations from a wide range of sources. Peter’s Room (1961) even gives central place to a game modelled on the fantasy histories of the Brontë children. And there are plots and sub-plots, unusual for their period, which deal with family and social concerns and with religious issues: a Jewish girl and the production of a Nativity celebration at Kingscote, Patrick Merrick and his dismay at his Church’s sacrificing of the Tridentine Mass.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Antonia Forest’s skill in these novels for children is her handling of time. The ten books of stories set in the 20th century appeared over 34 years, from Autumn Term to Run Away Home (1982), and yet in that real time the characters have gone through only two and a half years of fictional schooldays and holidays. The discrepancy seems not to have troubled the author one whit. (Vatican II and what she called “its Protestantising ‘reforms’”, could not have occurred in Patrick Merrick’s boyhood, nor yet decimal currency or The Morecambe and Wise Show in Nicola’s girlhood.) No acknowledgement is made of the peculiarity and, in consequence, the reader does not bother to notice it.

What matters are the specifics of each tale and the new or changing light that is shed on her profoundly attractive Marlows.

Although their adventures were uniformly well-received, and the appeal to children of “living” with a fictional family widely acknowledged, the books disappeared from publishers’ lists and remained long out of print. (Perhaps single-sex boarding schools, where lacrosse was played and where the pupils might own falcons or ride to hounds, did not figure high on the list of approved subjects.)

However, Forest’s original child-readers were tenacious enthusiasts. She was the subject of frequent discussion in the sprightly journal Folly, and she was the subject of a chapter in Victor Watson’s influential study Reading Series Fiction (2000) in which he praised “the supple and vibrant complexity” of her writing. It thus gave her much pleasure to agree, before she died, to a complete reprint by the niche publisher, Girls Gone By, of all the Marlow stories. But we shall never know what the future held for that interesting family.

Antonia Forest never married.

Antonia Forest, novelist, was born on May 26, 1915. She died on November 28, 2003, aged 88.