Posted by Dave Thewlis on November 17, 1998 at 18:56:14:
In Reply to: Re: 'The Far-Distant Oxus'. posted by kate crosby on November 17, 1998 at 18:07:36:
Kate, thanks very much for the overview of the books -- certainly intensifies my interest
in acquiring copies. I acquired and read Far Distant Oxus about four or five years ago and it's
very hard to tell what my reaction would have been as a child. Certainly I enjoyed the book;
as certainly I didn't feel as close to the stories and the characters as I did to the Ransome
books when I first read them (or when I read them now, but of course I read them now through the
perspective of childhood experience). The authors were indeed schoolchildren when they wrote TFDO;
they sent the manuscript to Ransome and he at first refused to believe that it had been written by
children; once convinced, he helped them to get it published.
Personally I think the key to the "fictional strong women" such as Nancy and Bridget is that the point
of the author(s) wasn't that the character was a "strong woman" but a "strong character" and gender didn't
have much to do with the character's role in the story or in relationship to the other characters. That to
me is part of what makes Ransome's books special. I know that I absorbed the relationships between the characters
in the Ransome books as a model (well, let's leave out Roger).
I'm not sure I'm on to the point you were striving at when you said "...fictional strong women...had an influence
on what happened later" though. Later in the books, later in life, later in the evolution of civilization?
"Yes" is a valid answer.