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[elen_nare]

Dear Pamela Cox,

I actually really enjoy your Malory Towers continuations! However, a small peeve:

When a fairly major plot point in "Secrets at Malory Towers" is Felicity's discovery of a lost locket with the initials JJ, which doesn't seem to be belong to any girl in the school... It might be an idea for Felicity to ask June Johns if it belongs

Comments

[pathology_doc]

so how can they be at school during the same period?

They can't! IIRC Daffy's words in Last Term... are to the effect that she'll be going to Malory Towers too, in six years. And that, even with Felicity in First Form (which she isn't), would count it out. It sounds like Cox was so desperate to have them at school together that she either fluffed the timing or ignored it. Then again, there are enough omissions in Blyton's original canon (e.g. Gwendoline's last name changes from Lacey to Lacy and AFAIK neither Mary-Lou nor Irene ever had their surnames stated) that maybe she just said damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

[elen_nare]

Yeah, I guess she just ignored the timing on that. TBH, I think it would bother me less if it had been Blyton doing that; I tend to be more forgiving of continuity issues, inconsistent aging, etc for authors writing before there were things like Excel spreasheets to nicely keep track of everything - though there are limits! (Elinor Brent-Dyer, I'm looking at you :P).

Lacey-Lacy and the missing surnames don't really bother me all that much; I was always far more puzzled by how progressing through the forms actually worked! I mean, when Darrell starts, most of the other girls have already had at least a term in First Form - yet from then on, they mostly move through the school together, and Darrell is said to have four terms (so presumably more than a year!) in First Form. Do they stay two years in the First (magically only aging one) or something?

[pathology_doc]

I used to write in this fandom and that timing of terms was one of the issues that would drive me up the wall. From what I've read, Blyton used to imagine the events playing out in front of her as if on a movie screen and simply hammered out what she saw in her mind's eye. Her output was prodigious, but her attention to the little details suffered as a result. I don't think she ever kept track of this stuff herself; if she needed to make reference to something that had happened in a past year, she could just pick up one of her manuscripts or a printed copy.

Unless some miraculous trunk full of author's notes turns up in the attic of an obscure and ancient girls' school on the Cornish coast, we shall probably never know. :P She got what she wanted - which was a legion of fans lapping up her books, most of whom were too young and too busy putting themselves in Darrell's shoes (or wishing they were Darrell's particular friend) to care about the inconsistencies.

[elen_nare]

My sister writes in the fandom, and I've more than once seen her just giving up and using the timing that works best for the story rather than trying to actually make sense of it. Then there's St. Clare's, where they start two years older but still have six forms...

Heh, very true. And all in all, considering the sheer scale of her output, and the many different series she wrote, I think she didn't do that badly really :) It could have been a lot worse!