Nancy Blackett

At the opening of the series in Swallows and Amazons, Nancy is 12 years old and lives with her younger sister Peggy and her widowed mother in a large Lakeland house called Beckfoot.

Nancy is still a prime mover of the action even when she is prevented from taking direct part such as when she is quarantined with mumps in Winter Holiday, or when she and Peggy are kept at home when the Great Aunt comes to stay in The Picts and the Martyrs.

[3] Nancy is not without fault and her flexible standards of honesty, particularly when contrasted with the rigid code of John and the Swallows has been suggested as one of the reasons for her popularity as it makes her seem "more alive for today's reader".

[5] Another suggestion is that she was based on Georgina Rawdon Smith, whose father had been at Rugby with Ransome, and who, with her sister Pauline, met and played with the Altounyan children on the shores of Coniston.

"[10] Victor Watson, a critic of children's fiction, proposes that Nancy's principal role in the books is to open up "possibilities" and "disrupt the comfortable certainties of the Walker family".

[11] In 1960, a possible path for Nancy's adult life was proposed when critic Hugh Shelley postulated that she might have found the Second World War liberating and become a WREN.

[13] Today, Nancy is viewed as a subversive figure who, in the context of interwar Britain, offered young girls the possibility of an alternative route to adulthood.

[14] The character has been cited by feminist author and academic Sara Maitland as a childhood role model "who transcended the restriction of femininity without succumbing to the lure of male-identification" and a "hero who had all the characteristics necessary for the job; who lived between the countries of the material and the imaginary".