Continuity
Charlotte Sometimes begins one year after the ending of The Summer Birds, after Charlotte has left her small village school, and covers the period of her first term at boarding school. While written three years after Emma in Winter — set during Charlotte's second term at boarding school — the events of Charlotte Sometimes occur beforehand. Charlotte's sister Emma, and their grandfather, Elijah, do not appear in Charlotte Sometimes, although there are references to them in the novel. 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 where Charlotte Sometimes ends, and indicates that Charlotte will stay a week with one of the friends she made at boarding school during the events of Charlotte Sometimes. Emma in Winter then follows Emma's story while Charlotte returns to boarding school.
Charlotte Sometimes continues the theme, begun in Emma in Winter, of time travel into the past. While this is unexplained in Charlotte Sometimes, a theorised explanation is given in Emma in Winter. Emma and Bobby are reading journals in Emma and Charlotte's grandfather Elijah's study, where they find an article theorising the non-linear nature of time. It describes time as being like a coiled spring, which can be pushed together, so that some moments in time can be very near a moment in another time.
Read more about this topic: Charlotte Sometimes (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word continuity:
“If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Only the family, society’s smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be “strangers in a strange land,” who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.”
—Salvador Minuchin (20th century)