{"id":1204,"date":"2011-03-16T11:52:21","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T15:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2024-01-13T10:19:17","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T15:19:17","slug":"elizabeth-goudge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=1204","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Goudge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Goudge is a British writer who published 16 novels from 1936 to 1970.\u00a0 She also wrote short stories, children\u2019s books, and books about Christianity.\u00a0 I was lucky to find her during a period of severe depression, and lucky that the Franconia Library has a complete collection of her novels.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gradually acquired most of them, and I read them over and over again.\u00a0 I find them very comforting.
\nThree things that mean a lot to me: she writes about the realm of Spirit interacting with us in our daily life.\u00a0 She is clearly a Christian, but not a narrow minded one.\u00a0 There\u2019s room in her world view for fairies and other nature spirits.\u00a0 In her novel about the English Civil War between Royalists (many of whom were Catholics) and Puritans who were Protestants, she writes compassionately about people on both sides.
\nSecondly, she introduces a character in such a way that I have a complete picture of them and no difficulty telling them apart.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve read a lot of books in which this is not true.) Sometimes she introduces people in a scene that quickly reveals some important characteristic, sometimes she tells a life story in a few paragraphs.
\nThirdly, her descriptions of nature are detailed, evocative, and beautiful.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know any other writer who can describe the English countryside so movingly.
\nOn the jacket of Pilgrim\u2019s Inn,<\/em> the second in the trilogy of the Eliot family, she says of her own writing: \u201cIt has a happy ending, for I love these people too much to let them be unhappy for long.\u00a0 I know that happy endings are sometimes inartistic, and certainly not always true to life, but I can\u2019t write any other kind.\u00a0 I am not a serious chronicler of the very terrible contemporary scene, but just a story-teller, and there is so much tragedy about us everywhere today that we surely don\u2019t want it in story books to which we turn when we are ill or unhappy, or can\u2019t go to sleep at night.\u00a0 We must escape somewhere.\u00a0 I had some happy hours of escape when I was writing this book, and I hope very much that perhaps a few readers my have them when they read it.\u201d
\nElizabeth herself suffered from arthritis and depression, and she had considerable experience of mental illness, her own and others.\u00a0 She has created some wonderful characters who struggle with depression and mental illness, and reveals them from the inside.\u00a0 One of my favorites is Cousin Mary, who appears only in her Diary in The Scent of Water<\/em>.
\nI find Goudge very comforting because she doesn\u2019t deny the painful side of life but she encloses it in a story that essentially shows how \u201call things work together for good.\u201d\u00a0 Although she writes about some difficult people, there\u2019s only one person I can remember who is really \u201cevil\u201d and that\u2019s Mrs. Belling in The Rosemary Tree<\/em>.\u00a0 There are a number of characters who are unattractive at first but are later redeemed.\u00a0 The scenes of redemption are always moving, and when I read them something inside me relaxes and says \u201cYes\u201d with relief.<\/p>\n

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Elizabeth Goudge is a British writer who published 16 novels from 1936 to 1970.\u00a0 She also wrote short stories, children\u2019s books, and books about Christianity.\u00a0 I was lucky to find her during a period of severe depression, and lucky that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-healing","category-interesting-link","category-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}