Tag Archives: elizabeth goudge

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Linnets and Valerians (Revised)

I started reading this novel to my daughters last week, and I raved about it. I’m withdrawing my rave. In fact, I’m discontinuing it as a read-aloud. Normally I don’t write about either unfinished or abandoned books. But since I foolishly wrote about this one before I finished it and would feel bad if anyone else picked it up based on my premature enthusiasm, I feel the need for a second post.

The opening chapters have the Elizabeth Goudge trademark of wonderful place descriptions, as well as entertaining and lovable characters and a goodly dose of humor. A bit farther in, however, it became apparent that in order to read this aloud to my children, I would need to be prepared to talk about witchcraft, voodoo dolls, so-called white magic, and the interweaving of folklore and myth with fact in a way that’s misleading and confusing. I decided to pause the reading aloud and finish it myself before going any further, then realized it would be a mistake to continue it together.

Goudge is classed as a Christian author and comes from a religious family, but Christianity is depicted as colorless, stuffy, incomprehensible and powerless in contrast to the beauty and vitality of nature and its attendant spirits. One of the main characters is a vicar, but even he, along with his servant and the children in his charge, entertain a mysterious faith in honeybees, to whom they pray for protection. (Honest.) The happy ending is brought about not by God’s help (he is never appealed to) but by counteracting black magic with white magic.

What’s the difference between a book like this and, say, the Narnia chronicles, or the Oz books, or The Hobbit, or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or Stardust? There are many fantasies that don’t bother me. One difference is that they have boundary lines between fact and fantastic: a wardrobe, a tornado that takes your house far away, a totally imagined universe like Middle Earth, a rabbit hole or a village wall that defines and limits the realm of alternative reality. This book has no such boundaries. It seems to purport that Pan really walks in Devonshire, that honeybees really are angelic protectors, that superstition is more deeply real than the church of England.

In a separate class is the kind of witchcraft practiced by Emma Cobley in this story, which is of course real. It belongs to the tradition of King Saul in the Bible when he consults the witch of Endor, or Simon the Sorcerer in the New Testament. It’s not defeated with “white magic” but by the Spirit of God. Goudge’s handling of these themes is not what we’re justified to expect from a professing Christian writer.

C.S. Lewis felt that part of literature’s job is to re-enchant the world, and that was what initially attracted me to Elizabeth Goudge. She evokes so effectively the non-physical aspects of a place, evoking a sense of its history and offering exact and detailed observation. It seemed at first to help me remember my own delight in the world, a delight too easily overshadowed by the more prosaic concerns of adult life. But in the end her spiritual vision corrupts my original feeling of kinship. I think I suspected this when I read The Bird in the Tree, then moreso when I read her autobiography, The Joy of the Snow. But somehow I kept hoping I was wrong.

It’s tough to find an author who seems wonderful — only to discover, a few books later, that you have large and serious differences. I still like The Scent of Water and The Dean’s Watch. But my first impressions have significantly cooled as my reading list has lengthened. In fact, this may be it for me.

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The Heart of the Family

Over the last year I discovered Elizabeth Goudge, a 20th century Christian author with a remarkable gift for capturing the beauty and sense of place in the English countryside that forms the setting for many of her books. Readers of Goudge will be familiar with her trilogy about the Eliot family, their indomitable matriarch Lucilla Eliot, and their country estate Damerosehay, a 16th-century mansion patterned after the the one to which Goudge herself retreated to face her own inner demons.

The real Damerosehay is demolished, but this country estate is listed at the Elizabeth Goudge website as suggestive of how it may have looked:

The Heart of the Family concludes the series about the Eliots, and I found it the most difficult and least enjoyable of the three. A great deal of it revisits ground already covered in The Bird in the Tree and Pilgrim’s Inn through descriptions of places and people, which is fine if you feel the attachment to this family that many readers apparently do. It gives you the sense of returning to a loved place for a visit.

I find myself impatient with the Eliots this time around. Members of the gentry, they have little to do, it seems, other than hold forth in philosophical discussion about things they openly admit they haven’t really experienced, chiefly suffering. Their casual quoting of Shakespeare and discussions of various works of art seemed implausible to me in Pilgrim’s Inn because it’s hard to imagine so much easy brilliance in the same genetic pool. Several times as I was reading this book I felt like Goudge was really writing drama, as the book is full of set speeches where characters give voice to Goudge’s views on a variety of weighty topics including suffering, infidelity, death and dying, war, artistic temperament, and mental anguish. The idea of substitution reappears as well, an idea I also encountered in Charles Williams’ novels, whereby a person can offer up their own suffering on behalf of another person.

Much is written about the spirituality of Elizabeth Goudge, but the more I read of her the less I see much of any true vertical dimension in her books. It may be that I, with my Protestant sensibility, simply miss it. But mostly it seems like her way of configuring the problems and solutions of human existence is horizontal. People strive to attain a level of enlightenment through which they can help one another, admittedly in God’s name, but through a conception of prayer that seems to have more to do with reaching a particular mystical union with others than with actually interacting with God as a divine Person. If you’re a reader of Goudge, feel free to comment on this and direct my attention to anything I may be missing. On one hand I like the emphasis on spiritual discipline and mental transformation; it’s a nice antidote to an exclusively verbal faith. But this seems weighted too far the other way, toward, almost, self-salvation.

To sum up, this book revisits the Eliot clan and introduces a new character into the mix: Sebastian Weber, a guest at Damerosehay whose experience in World War II poses a stark contrast to the privileged Eliots. We also meet David and Sally’s two children and greet their third. There is little physical action, but a fair amount of discussion and flashback, and Goudge somewhat heavy-handedly works out her ideas about suffering, the contrasts of life and character, and the romantic idea that children and the elderly have mystical insight because they are “trailing clouds of glory” — close to “the other world.” The unmistakably occultish flavor of some of her ideas about the spirits that haunt certain places and people is present but much less prominent in this book. Written in response to requests for another story about the Eliots, The Heart of the Family no doubt satisfies those hungry for a bit more resolution and confidence in the family’s future after Pilgrim’s Inn.

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Linnets and Valerians

*Edited to add: See my revised view of this book.

It’s Read-Aloud Thursday, and none of the shorter books we’ve read this week seem post-worthy. But we’re a few chapters into Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians, an ALA Notable Book for Children published in 1964.

We are having a blast with it.

For one thing, I’m getting a chance to introduce the girls to a recently-discovered author, my favorite discovery from 2010. Elizabeth Goudge has a knack for writing descriptions that capture the essence of a place, and the places are invariably appealing to me. This book is no exception. It concerns four children who run away from their grandmother, steal a pony and cart, eat all the groceries stashed therein, and are taken by said pony to the delightful rambling home of a retired schoolmaster who happens to be a distant relation they’ve never met. (So if you insist on “good role models,” I suppose there’s no argument to be made for these children — at least not yet.) That’s all we really know at this point, but I’m looking forward to listening in as he educates the children in the classical style.

Goudge’s descriptions seem to be inspiring lots of belly-laughs. Here’s an example, from a scene where the retired schoolmaster is leading his just-discovered charges and their dog, Absalom, through his study:

The children followed in single file, Absalom bringing up the rear with his tail between his legs. Then he caught sight of the owl, barked joyously, and leapt up into the elderly gentleman’s chair. The owl took off and floated to the top of a large oil painting of some ruins and a thunderstorm that hung over the fireplace. Then he opened his beak, said “Hick,” and a pellet shaped like a plum stone shot out of it and hit Absalom on the nose. Glancing off onto the carpet, the pellet broke into a collection of small beaks and claws and a threepenny bit. “Do not do that again,” said the elderly gentleman to Absalom. “If Hector is annoyed he shoots out undigested matter in this unpleasant fashion. You, boy, what’s your name? Speak up. What? Timothy? Shovel up the beaks and claws and put them in the fire. You may keep the threepenny bit. Sit down. Do not touch my books or my papers. In twenty minutes I shall for my sins be with you again. Merciful heavens, here’s a pretty kettle of fish!

In the other Goudge books I’ve read (all but one of which I’ve reviewed), I’ve found the children a bit irritating. These are thus far the least annoying, but as in the other books they exist in a gentler world of adults who have time for them and take them seriously, even when they do trying things. This is part of the appeal of Elizabeth Goudge for me. It’s a rather nostalgic vision, but one that I find inspiring — one of the pleasantest fictional “elsewheres” I know. The vocabulary and lifestyle are a few steps removed from us, but this book is just one more example of what a non-issue these things are when the basic sympathy between author and audience is strong enough. It’s a real treat to be experiencing this story with my children.

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Pilgrim’s Inn

“Who did that?” he demanded.“Ben, my oldest boy,” said Nadine…

“It’s damn good,” said John Adair, almost with violence.

“But the drawing –”

“Faulty, of course, he’s had no teaching. But he’s got it — the light.”

It’s a conversation between artist John Adair and Nadine Eliot, returning in this second book of the trilogy Elizabeth Goudge began with The Bird In the Tree. They are discussing a painting of her son Ben Eliot’s, but they could just as accurately be discussing Pilgrim’s Inn, for in some ways it’s a flawed book.

The characters are way too smart and perceptive to be at all “realistic.” Instead of taking place in the world I live in, where people misunderstand a look, a gesture, even an overt statement, this tale takes place in a superhuman dimension of highly aware and well-read people, well-versed in classic paintings and acting and literature, quoting Shakespeare to one another. Worse, it seems obvious that Goudge couldn’t figure out how to get her story across without intruding her narrative on her characters. At times, they seem like mere puppets voicing beautiful but implausible speeches to one another.

Yet as John Adair says of Ben, “She’s got it — the light.” Despite its technical weaknesses, it develops an imaginative and spiritual vision that’s deeply nourishing. Goudge tells a story in her autobiography of a similar experience in an art class where she had painted a flawed picture, but one the teacher held up as an example of sure inspiration; it captured the feel of faerie, he explained. This book captures the feel of a corner of the world rich in history and redemptive power. I loved it.

At the center of the tale is George and Nadine Eliot’s purchase of the Herb of Grace, an ancient pilgrim’s inn (or maison dieu) in which people used to stay when they came on pilgrimages to the nearby monastery. It’s a story about getting to the heart of things, be they marital failures or nervous breakdowns or artistic technique or traumatic pasts. Everyone in this novel is broken or wounded and in need of healing in some way, and they find it while at the Herb of Grace.

Like other Goudge stories, in this one getting to the heart of human problems is intertwined with getting to the heart of architecture. The richness of the past flowing through to the present as a redemptive force is made most literal in the uncovering of the Herb of Grace’s history, where we learn the source of the mysterious but unmistakable spirit of graciousness, safety, and welcome it extends to all who come there. The 16th-century origin of the building, and the tales about its original Cistercian host, are traced in various physical artifacts and places rich in meaning that the Eliots discover in their first months there. At the heart of the house is a chapel, a symbol of consecration and love, that renders in architecture what must happen in the hearts of those who come there if they are to find new life.

Elizabeth Goudge hasn’t yet failed to evoke places I desperately wish I could visit. Her descriptions seem to hit a nerve in me, perhaps because they awaken a certain nostalgia and yearning, and perhaps because they are unabashedly spiritual. There are no places that are merely physical, no times consisting merely of the present, and no people who exist without reference or connection to others. Goudge acknowledges the dark aspects of this fallen world, but reinforces the hope that there is more in it than meets the eye — enough to satisfy the deepest longings of the heart.

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The White Witch

The White Witch is a historical novel about the English Civil War(s) of the 17th century. It is surely one of Elizabeth Goudge’s best works, capturing not only the political conflict of Puritan against Royalist, but the many smaller-scale conflicts that characterize human existence. Some of these conflicts are antagonized by the war, but others are ever-present realities, whether personal, political, or spiritual: citizen vs. gypsy, Protestant vs. Catholic, trust in God vs. trust in magic, love for security vs. love for God. The all encompassing contrast is between God’s mercy and man’s rebellious, often misguided search for redemption.

The white witch of the title is Froniga Haslewood, half gypsy and half gentlewoman, an herbalist and healer whose strength and wisdom she learns ultimately to wield without dependence on the spells and spirits common to her trade. Hers is the anchoring consciousness through which we experience the broad scope of the story and its numerous personalities. Woven of Goudge’s usual poetic and deeply comforting narrative, this is a story I found very satisfying and free of the Gothic trappings of some of her other books.

Some themes will be familiar to those who have read The Dean’s Watch or The Scent of Water, the two books that, with this one, comprise my favorites so far. The idea of substitution, of laying down one’s life for a friend, comes into the tale more than once as characters willingly offer themselves for those too far gone spiritually to be able to find their own way back to God. All the characters are flawed, yet all grow as a holy and glorious God is clearly depicted as working his often mysterious but always redemptive purposes. A recusant priest with shame in his past, turned spy for the Royalists; a black witch who has long ago sold her soul for power over her others; a gypsy matron grown almost to sainthood who retains a single grudge against her niece; these are just a few of the cast of characters in this richly populated book who need to be lifted into a fuller experience of divine love and power.

I was struck again by the compassion Goudge displays for all her characters. One of the contrasts in the story is between Catholic and Protestant, and one scene comes to mind in particular in which Robert Haslewood comes home from war having been won over more fervently to the Puritan cause, and he takes all the homespun decorations in the little church — carvings made by the parson, flowers, even the cross — and sets them on fire as relics of popery. It is Christmas morning, and the people watch in horror — as certainly Goudge does too, yet she manages to portray even Robert sympathetically.

This is a long, multifaceted novel impossible to do justice to in a review. As a Christian, I find Goudge’s fictional world deeply encouraging. It’s a world where God’s spirit, and his unfailing delight, are immanent in his creation — its scents, its sights, its often tragic events and its fallen and struggling people. I have lingered between the covers of this book not only because of its beauty as art, but because of its savor as food for the soul.