Charlotte Sometimes

Charlotte Sometimes is a children's novel by the English writer Penelope Farmer, published in 1969 in Britain and the United States. It is the third and best-known of three books featuring the Makepeace sisters, Charlotte and Emma, sometimes known as the Aviary Hall books. The story follows a girl starting at boarding school who finds one morning she has traveled mysteriously back more than 40 years and is known as Clare. Charlotte and Clare change places each night, alternating between 1918 and Charlotte's time; although Charlotte and Clare never meet, they communicate through diary notes in an exercise book. The story is written from Charlotte's point of view: the narrative never follows Clare. Charlotte becomes trapped in Clare's time, struggling to maintain her identity. Background At the age of 21, Penelope Farmer was contracted for her first collection of short stories, The China People. One story originally intended for it proved too long to include. This was rewritten as the first chapter of The Summer Birds (1962), her first book featuring Charlotte and Emma Makepeace. A second book, Emma in Winter, with Emma as the main character, followed in 1966. Charlotte Sometimes was first published in 1969 by Harcourt in the United States, and by Chatto & Windus in the UK in the same year. Penelope Farmer arranged many incidents in Charlotte Sometimes ahead of time based on family experiences. She later wrote that Charlotte and Emma were originally based on her mother and her mother's sister as children, having no parents and "having to be everything to each other", one being the responsible one, the other being rather difficult. She wrote, "Emma and Charlotte have grown in their own ways and aren't exactly based on my mother and her sister now, but this is where it started." Penelope Farmer's mother, Penelope Boothby, who was "talkative and unconventional", besides being the inspiration for Emma, also inspired the character of Emily. The boarding school in the novel is set near where Penelope Farmer lived in London, but based on the West Heath Girls' School in Sevenoaks, Kent, which she and her twin sister Judith attended in the 1950s. Elements in the book based on the school include the pillared front door, the glass verandah and the cedar tree, which still stands, as of 2020. Some characters were based on real students of the time.