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,Anita Silvey, ed: Children's books and their creators (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 238 sometimes known as the Aviary Hall books.Kidlit - Clare Moby, in Aviary Hall books, by Penelope Farmer The story follows a girl starting at boarding school who finds one morning she has travelled 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."Penelope Farmer" in Something About the Author 105 (1999) p. 67. 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.Margaret K. McElderry, "Penelope Farmer: The Development of an Author". In Elementary English Vol. 51, No. 6, September 1974, p. 804. Quoted in Children's Literature Review Vol. 8. Gale Research Company, 1985. 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' in Something About the Author 40 (1985) p. 77. Penelope Farmer's mother, Penelope Boothby, who was "talkative and unconventional", besides being the inspiration for Emma, also inspired the character of Emily.'Penelope Farmer' in Something About the Author 105 (1999) p. 66. 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."The Cure(d)". Penelope Farmer's personal blog entry, 9 June 2007 Some characters were based on real students of the time. The episode when Charlotte walks onto the glass verandah is based on a real event, when Penelope Farmer climbed on the glass verandah and broke it.Penelope Farmer's personal blog entry, 21 November 2007.
Plot Part one Charlotte arrives at a new boarding school, and is shown around by a prefect named Sarah. Sarah's mother also attended the school. She is to share a room with other girls, Susannah, Elizabeth, Janet, and Vanessa. The next morning she finds herself in the same place, but in the year 1918 – with war still going on. A younger girl called Emily calls Charlotte her sister and addresses her as "Clare". She tries to spend the day in 1918 without being noticed. Each night, Charlotte finds herself swapping between her own time and Clare's time. They must learn to live two different lives. Charlotte and Clare manage to write to each other in Clare's diary, which they share and hide in their bed.
Emily and Clare are supposed to leave their room soon and go into lodgings with the Chisel Brown family. They have to make sure this happens when Clare is in 1918, because they won't be able to switch again after that.
Part two Charlotte, expecting to have returned to her own time for the last time, is shocked to find that she has not, and is still in 1918. She will go into lodgings with the Chisel Brown family: it appears she will be trapped in the past. In the house, Miss Agnes Chisel Brown shows Charlotte and Emily the toys she once played with, including toy soldiers and a solitaire board with marbles. She tells the two girls about her brother Arthur, who died in the war. Charlotte reflects, forward and back: to Arthur in the past; her own sister Emma in the future; and Clare, trapped in Charlotte's time. She struggles with her identity, being Charlotte sometimes but Clare at other times.
Charlotte and Emily form a plan to enter the school by night in an attempt to get Charlotte into the bed which will take Charlotte back to her own time. Inside her room, which is now being used as the school sickroom, Charlotte finds the bed is occupied, and thus she cannot return home. She escapes being seen by Nurse Gregory but is seen by another student, Ruth.
Charlotte is not the only one who struggles with identity. Emily tells of the wretchedness of being motherless and unwanted, moving between homes while her father fights in the war. Meanwhile, Charlotte dreams she is fighting to stay as Charlotte. She dreams about Arthur.
A letter arrives for Clare and Emily from their father. Emily does not let Charlotte read it, to the bewilderment of the other girls. Charlotte, thoughtful as always, wonders who Sarah's mother is: perhaps it will be Charlotte herself if she is trapped in 1918?
At night, Charlotte dreams about Arthur again, as a drummer boy, and that she has turned into Agnes. Her crisis of identity comes to a head as she struggles to preserve her identity as Charlotte.
One evening, the Chisel Browns hold a seance in an attempt to speak to Arthur. The girls hide behind the curtains to observe. During the seance, they hear Clare's voice crying out for Emily. Emily cries out, and the two girls are discovered and disciplined. Later, Miss Agnes asks about the voice they heard at the seance – Clare's. She then tells Charlotte and Emily of Arthur's war experiences.
Finally, the Armistice comes. The war is over: people dance and celebrate in the street, and Charlotte and Emily join in, even though it would anger Mr Chisel Brown. In disgrace, Charlotte and Emily are sent back to the school. Miss Agnes gives them the toys as a gift.
Part three Ruth recalls her "dream" of seeing Clare whilst in the sickroom. Because of the flu epidemic the students are able to play wild games in the dormitories, and eventually Charlotte is able to sleep in the bed that will return her to her own time.
On arriving back, Charlotte is startled to learn that her roommate Elizabeth had deduced the truth about her swap with Clare. Charlotte wonders about Sarah's mother and what has become of Emily and Clare. At the school, Charlotte sees the elderly Miss Wilkin. Charlotte realises that she had known Miss Wilkin when she was a young teacher in 1918.
One day, Charlotte learns what has become of Emily and Clare through a conversation with Sarah. Sarah's mother is Emily, and Clare died in the flu epidemic after the war. Later, Charlotte and Elizabeth discuss the events Charlotte has experienced. They find the exercise book in one of the legs of the bed, where it has been for forty years. It includes the last letter Charlotte wrote to Clare.
Charlotte receives a package from Emily as an adult. It contains a letter from Emily, and the toys which Miss Agnes had given them over forty years ago. Charlotte places the marbles from the solitaire set in a jar and fills it with water, which the other girls admire. Charlotte feels a sense of personal identity in now having her own decoration to her dresser, yet muses that the marbles belonged to her when she was living the life of another person, namely Clare. The end of term comes, and the boarders leave the school in the school bus, singing rhymes.Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes, Harcourt, 1969. (This last episode is not in the 1985 revised edition.)
Continuity The first novel featuring Charlotte and Emma Makepeace was The Summer Birds, published in 1962, set in the South Downs in southern England. Charlotte Sometimes begins one year after the events in The Summer Birds after Charlotte has left her small village school, and covers the period of her first term at boarding school. Although Charlotte's year is not explicitly stated in Charlotte Sometimes, several passages suggest that Charlotte's year is 1963, the year after The Summer Birds was written.While the novel does not state Charlotte's year, it indicates that 14 September was a Saturday in both Charlotte's and Clare's years; that Charlotte travelled back "over forty years"; and that, had Charlotte become trapped in the past and grown up in Clare's place, she would be "a woman of nearly sixty when Emma was still only twelve," with 1963 – the year after The Summer Birds was written – being the only year fitting these descriptions. Although some reviewers have given 1958 as Charlotte's year, being exactly forty years after 1918, the year 1958 is not given in the book.
While written three years after Emma in Winter (1966) — which was set during Charlotte's second term at boarding school — the events of Charlotte Sometimes occur beforehand, during Charlotte's first term.
Charlotte's sister Emma and their grandfather Elijah do not appear in Charlotte Sometimes, although there are references to them. For example, Charlotte compares Emily with her sister Emma in her own time, and compares the Chisel Brown family home with her own home, Aviary Hall.
Emma in Winter begins during the same Christmas holidays at which Charlotte Sometimes ends, and indicates that Charlotte will stay a week with one of the friends she made at boarding school.Penelope Farmer, Emma in Winter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, p. 6. Emma in Winter then follows Emma's story while Charlotte returns to boarding school.
Themes Identity While writing Emma in Winter, Farmer was unaware that identity was such a dominant theme in the book. She only realised that when she read Margery Fisher's comments on the book in Growing Point. She had a similar realisation, this time on her own, while writing Charlotte Sometimes. She writes that "halfway through Charlotte Sometimes I realized that I was writing a book about identity. I am a twin, a non-identical one, and apparently one of the chief problems of non-identical twins is always the establishment of a genuine and separate sense of identity. Looking back I can see this has in fact been an obsession with me, since the age of twelve or so at least."
Author David Rees also points out that identity as a major theme. He wrote, "Its most memorable passages are poignant or resigned or concerned with absence, loss, or death.... Its theme is not so much maturing relationships, but identity.... Charlotte begins to wonder, with increasing dismay, if she really is Charlotte: perhaps she has turned into Clare, rather than just substituted for her. This may be an adult fear – the fear of not being everything you and other people have always said you are, the realization that you may be someone totally different."David Rees, "The Marble in the Water: Penelope Farmer". In The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults, The Horn Book, Inc., 1980, pp. 1–13. Quoted in Children's Literature Review, Vol. 8. Gale Research Company, 1985.
Time travel