They clash on an island in the lake, make friends, and have a series of adventures that weave tales of pirates and exploration into everyday life in rural England.

Winter Holiday (1933) has them meet Dick and Dorothea Callum ("the Ds"), siblings of a similar age also visiting the area.

Two other books are set in Suffolk and Essex around the River Orwell; one involves an involuntary trip across the North Sea to the Netherlands.

Two books, Peter Duck and Missee Lee, and possibly also Great Northern?, are metafictional: fictional stories of the protagonists' voyages to exotic lands, as imagined by themselves.

She often conjures up her own adventures, while becoming a hero in the novels, for instance, by winning the "war" in Swallows and Amazons or finding an underground spring in Pigeon Post.

Nancy – who disdains her baptismal name Ruth because her uncle has said that pirates are supposed to be ruthless – is a strong character who can be seen as a tomboy.

Most prominent are the Blackett sisters' uncle Jim Turner, called Captain Flint by the children after a character in Treasure Island, and Mrs Barrable in Coot Club.

Extensive elements in the characters and the settings can be traced to incidents in Ransome's life and are raw material for much discussion and theorising about precise relationships.

The lake and surrounding fells amalgamate Windermere and Coniston Water, places where Ransome spent much of his childhood and later life.

Peter Duck and Missee Lee involve voyages of the schooner Wild Cat to the Caribbean and the South China Sea.

Most obvious is the inclusion of more fear and violence and the fact that the extended voyages would have taken the children from school for unacceptably long periods.

Both books are described on their title pages as "based on information supplied by the Swallows and Amazons", a description which is absent from the rest of the series.

Two abandoned chapters of Peter Duck (called Their Own Story) were found in Ransome's papers held in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.

It is sometimes included with Peter Duck and Missee Lee as metafictional, as the story would involve the children being away from school during the nesting season, which is in term time.

Myles North, the ornithologist who had originally suggested the plot to Ransome as the basis for a new novel, had initially proposed this, with the Wild Cat voyage again providing the background.

Ransome, however, wrote in reply that he wanted to maintain the clear distinction between the "romantic stories and the real ones", and that he had decided upon a "realistic treatment" for Great Northern?.

Taqui Altounyan, the oldest of the children to whom the first edition of Swallows and Amazons was dedicated, recalls that Ransome "shirked drawing faces and got over the difficulty with back views of shaggy heads of hair or hats.

Ellen Lewis Buell welcomed the latest work in the six-year-old series that had firmly established "a special niche in juvenile literature".

She noted the children's "vivid collective imagination which turned play into serious business" (hunting a gold mine on the moors) and observed, "It is the portrayal of this spirit which makes play a matter of desperate yet enjoyable earnestness which gives their distinctive stamp to Mr. Ransome's books.... Because he understands the whole-heartedness of youth he can invest a momentary experiment, such as young Roger's Indian scout work, with real suspense.

[9] The children's writer Elinor Lyon, in an autobiographical introduction to a reprint of the first book in her series about a pair of adventurous young siblings on the west coast of Scotland, remembers feeling a "dislike of the characters in Swallows and Amazons who are so good at things like sailing.

"[10] In 1963, the BBC screened a television series starring Susan George as "Kitty" (changed from Titty to Ransome's strong distaste).

[12] In 1984, the BBC adapted the two Norfolk-set stories, Coot Club and The Big Six, for television, entitled Swallows and Amazons Forever!