So there’s this weird thing that happens to me sometimes –

I come up with an idea, or I remember an old idea I had a while ago, and I know it can’t really be really original.  My mind, as a rule, just doesn’t generate things of that particular kind.  I must have adapted it from somewhere, maybe throwing in a few personal touches.  Which is fine, as far as it goes.  But I CAN’T REMEMBER WHERE I GOT IT.  I can’t think of anything like the thing, anything that might plausibly be the source.  This drives me batty.  I feel like some kind of unintentional plagiarist or something.    

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Last night, I was reminded of two NPCs that I came up with for an old aborted RPG project: Lady Violet and Lady Ivy. 

These two were actually fiction-within-a-fiction characters; inside the setting of the RPG, they were the main characters of a series of children’s fantasy novels.  (As it happens, they also turned out to be secretly “real,” but that’s not relevant right now.)  I am sure that these fictional novels belong to some very well-established subgenre, and that some book out there is exactly like them, but I’ll be damned if I can put my finger on it. 

Notable features of the Violet & Ivy “books” included:

* The setting is extremely British-flavored.  Hard to place historically, since it’s fake cod-Britain rather than real Britain, but overall it’s probably a weird mish-mash of Regency and mid-20th-century. 

* The main characters are two young ladies who might plausibly be anywhere from, say, seventeen to thirty.  They live together, on their own, in a big impressive estate on the outskirts of a country town; this is as implausible a situation as it sounds, and every so often there’s some bit of exposition explaining why they’re not with their families etc. 

* LV & LI always wear old-fashioned dresses in their respective colors.  Their attire – and their general affect – is gorgeous, and fancy, and very Modest and Appropriate.  They enjoy various ladylike pastimes like music, dancing, embroidery, poetry, etc.  They’re clearly meant to be respectable wish-fulfillment fantasy for young girls. 

* The earlier books are mostly dedicated to them solving extremely ordinary, prosaic problems that crop up in their everyday lives.  “Someone new has moved into town, and is having trouble with social adjustment!”  “Lady Violet is throwing a ball this evening and there’s so much to organize!”  “Lady Ivy’s frail cousin is visiting, and we don’t want to bore her OR to wear her out!”  Things like that.

* The later books mostly involve them visiting other towns, meeting up with obvious-reader-surrogate young girls, and helping those girls with their own prosaic everyday problems. 

* The protagonists’ attitude is relentlessly responsible, down-to-earth, and pragmatic, but in a weird slightly-subversive way; the general vibe is “most of the people in the world are extremely silly, and that probably includes most of the grown-ups you know, so sometimes you’re going to have to be sensible for them.” 

* They are both powerful, badass magicians.  This fact is almost never central to the plot.  About once per book, there will be some kind of horrific rampaging monster, and the two of them will have to slay it with their enchanted weapons; this is treated as a regrettable inconvenience, like getting caught in a rainstorm or something.  Occasionally, the people they interact with are fairies or mermaids or demons etc.  The books do not portray this as being particularly out-of-the-ordinary. 

* Every so often, it is hinted that the protagonists have off-screen love lives of some kind, but no actual information about this is ever provided.

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So, uh…can anyone tell me where I got this?