Being faithful: the ethics of homoaffection in Antonia Forest's Marlow novels

This article examines the ethical force and function of same-sex relationships in a ten-volume sequence of English children's books, published between 1948 and 1982, by Antonia Forest (pseudonym for Patricia Rubinstein, 1915-2003). From the late 1940s onwards, Forest's fiction articulates what Adrienne Rich theorizes in her classic work of lesbian ethics, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" (1975): the idea of same-sex bonds as the locus and standard of the ethical. Through the characters of the Marlow family (six sisters, two brothers) and their friends and enemies, Forest explores questions of honesty and self-deception, fidelity (both religious and personal) and betrayal, integrity and duality, performance and the boundaries of the self. Forest's exploration of these questions is persistently inflected by a resistance to heterosexuality and by a privileging of same-sex bonds, whether female or male. Forest's resistance to the pressures of conventional pieties and expected emotions, whether about love, friendship or the family, makes these books particularly important for lesbian readers.