Elizabeth
Goudge – Best Selling Author -1900-1984
By unknown. Original
publication The Joy of The Snow by Elizabeth Goudge immediate source scanned
from book.
Recently I re-read some of
Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge’s acclaimed novels, which include The Little
White Horse that J.K. Rowling selected of her favourite books and one of few with a direct
influence on the Harry Potter series. (The novel won Goudge the annual Carnegie Medal of the Library Association, as the year's best children's book by
a British subject. It was her own favourite among her works.) I have also re-visited my copy of Elizabeth’s
autobiography, The Joy of The Snow. “For the millions enchanted and inspired
by Elizabeth’s THE JOY OF THE SNOW will be an enduring monument to her life’s
work. It is more than an autobiography. She tells us, in poignant, candid
detail, the story of her spiritual, and physical journey from a golden
Edwardian childhood…and gives a glimpse of the deeply personal inspiration
behind some of the best loved writing of our time.”
Elizabeth’s parents
were Reverend Henry Goudge, who taught in the cathedral school in Wells,
Somerset, and Miss Ida Collenette, who met in Guernsey. Elizabeth loved her holidays
at her maternal grandparents’ home on the Channel Islands. She lived in Wells
until eleven years old when her father became a canon at Ely Cathedral and principal
of the Theological College. Ely, was Elizabeth’s “Home of homes.” In 1923, her
father accepted the prestigious post of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford,
and she was uprooted from Ely.
First educated at home
by a governess, then sent to a boarding school in Hampshire in 1914, she was
taught ‘how to run a big house, arrange flowers and be presented at court. However, she had a teacher who introduced
English literature, especially Shakespeare. It also familiarised her with the
New Forest and the sea marshes at Keyhaven, fodder for her novels. There were
few genteel ways for a young lady to earn a living so her parents insisted on
her attending an Art College to learn crafts she could teach to others. She
liked weaving, leather work etc., and wrote in her spare time.
The only child of a
loving family, Elizabeth enjoyed a privileged life, but was neither
well-educated nor prepared for the onslaught of the 20th century,
yet places where she had lived, would be the settings in her books. Her first published
novel, Island Magic, set in Guernsey, was a great success in England and
America. I enjoyed it as much when I read it for the second time as I did when
I read it years ago. It incorporates Elizabeth’s invalid mother’s memories,
island’s folklore, and myths. In the novel she describes St Peter’s Port where
her maternal grandparents lived until they moved to a farm close to one which gave
the fictional name Bon Repos. Her characters Rachel and Andre, who live there,
are based on those grandparents she adored. The protagonists’ children, whose
external and internal lives, hopes, and dreams Elizabeth portrays so sympathetically
and vividly, that they almost leap from the page.
A founding member of
The Romantic Novelist’s Association, her next novel Green Dolphin Country
published in 1944, brought her fame, won a Literary Guild Award and a special
prize of £30,000 from Louis B. Mayer of MGM before being filmed.
Elizabeth’s gift of changing
the commonplace into a magical, wonderous world inhabited by unique characters
enthralled her fans. Her
realistic, fantasy or historical fiction intertwines, legend and myth,
spirituality and love of England that add to their appeal; She stated “As this
world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be
reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of
value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist
that makes an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street
itself.”
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