Posted by: @cobalt-jade

IMO Gwendolen does not fit in at all with Prunaprismia, which is the only other human Narnian woman's name in the book. Gwendolen is of Welsh origin. Prunaprismia is something Lewis made up, for comic effect. The mens' names, Miraz, Glozelle, Sopespian, Caspian, while also made-up, fit together linguistically. And actually, with that z sound, so does Frizzle/Prizzle, though, if this was all a real country, it might have been originally been spelled Frizelle or Prizelle and then changed spelling through the centuries as many surnames do.

Well, "Caspian" is also the name of the world's largest inland sea, though I don't know if Lewis consciously took the name from there when naming Prince Caspian and his forebears! Out of interest, I looked it up and the Caspian Sea is named after the Caspi tribe who lived there in ancient times. No indication (at least from Wikipedia) that we know what the name originally meant. Maybe Lewis just liked the sound of the name "Caspian", and then made up relatively similar sounding names for at least some of the other Telmarines? (He took the name "Narnia" from an ancient town in Italy, after all, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are other names he picked up from leafing through the atlas...)

I don't have any problem with the apparent inconsistency between Prunaprismia and Gwendolen; one is a queen and the other is a village schoolgirl. There's not much more difference between their names than there is between some of the more "aristocratic"-sounding vs "common"-sounding names in our own society. In-universe, we don't know where the Telmarine Narnians' names and naming conventions may have come from. Out-of-universe (i.e. in reality), they were thought up by an author who, as I keep saying, wasn't even attempting to "do a Tolkien" when it came to world-building. He was simply writing stories that he hoped would appeal to young readers (as he once said somewhere — I can't remember where — he wanted to write the sorts of books he would have loved to read as a child), and he seems to have just grabbed whichever names he felt sounded right for his characters, without much thought as to where those names came from linguistically or how they could have come to be used in Narnia. I've never let any of this bother me, personally — I just enjoy the books!  

Posted by: @courtenay

I don't have any problem with the apparent inconsistency between Prunaprismia and Gwendolen; one is a queen and the other is a village schoolgirl. There's not much more difference between their names than there is between some of the more "aristocratic"-sounding vs "common"-sounding names in our own society. In-universe, we don't know where the Telmarine Narnians' names and naming conventions may have come from. Out-of-universe (i.e. in reality), they were thought up by an author who, as I keep saying, wasn't even attempting to "do a Tolkien" when it came to world-building. He was simply writing stories that he hoped would appeal to young readers (as he once said somewhere — I can't remember where — he wanted to write the sorts of books he would have loved to read as a child), and he seems to have just grabbed whichever names he felt sounded right for his characters, without much thought as to where those names came from linguistically or how they could have come to be used in Narnia. I've never let any of this bother me, personally — I just enjoy the books!  

As I have said before, "Prunaprismia" may suggest that she was "prim and proper" and we even learned in the book that Caspian didn't like her because she didn't like him. It's not clear whether she was part of the plot of Miraz taking over Narnia. The Walden movie adaption portrayed her as more sympathetic, but that is besides the point.

Gwendolen is a regular village school girl. She is actually happy that the old days are back, and she joins in the celebration when Aslan frees the school children.

So at times we can't know for sure why there aren't very many women's names in Narnia. I think you just have to enjoy the books.

@cobalt-jade I would say that Gwendolyn sounds like a Telmarine woman's name in that it has a lot of hard consonants and is vaguely whimsical.

A lot of Roald Dahl's children's books feature caricatured bullies and boors who get outlandish comeuppances, much like Miss Prizzle, the piglike schoolchildren and the man beating a boy in Beruna. 

I've read a number of people express the opinion that Dahl's children's books are creepy and also that the scene in Beruna in Prince Caspian is creepy. I don't and for the same reason in both cases: I don't see the characters as real people. They're clearly just people in a story who exist to either have their lives happily turned around or receive comeuppance. Dickens's characters, for all that they're larger than life, feel more real to me. (I guess that's why the expression is larger than life, not smaller than life.) 

A note about the names Nancy and Nellie:

Both are diminutives of other names.

Nancy or Nan is derived from Ann/e, when someone expressed ownership in attachment; so it was "my, or mine Ann/e" and the N moved across.

Nellie is derived from Helen in a similar but different way.

There is nothing particularly Narnian about either. They are ordinary English names.