“I think a woman’s history is very often like those old romances you laugh at,” says Lady Lucilla Eliot. “You may laugh at them but they were truer to life than many of those psychological novels you young people read nowadays. We women don’t sit half the day and night analyzing our emotions but we do perpetually fall in love out of wedlock, and over and over again we have to fight out the same old battle between love and duty.” Surely she speaks for Elizabeth Goudge, author of The Bird in the Tree . It’s a romance not just in that it deals with a human love story (though it does), but because it seeks to probe the mysteries of the human heart, evokes the past as a source of value, and uses a Gothic setting to mirror the characters’ internal states.

From different sources, I’ve seen three different titles alleged to be Ms. Goudge’s personal favorites among her works: The Little White Horse, The Dean’s Watch (this one was said to be the one she wanted to be remembered for), and the Eliot chronicles, of which this novel is the first. “Of my various book people the dearest are the Eliots. I am almost ashamed to confess how devoted I am to them,” Goudge admitted.

There is an unmistakably Gothic flavor to this tale, complete with a sublime seaside landscape, ruins, romance, and an old house the history of which so clings to it that the characters think they see ghosts.  Though I enjoyed it, I didn’t think it was as good as the two others I’ve read. It seemed more preachy, even ponderously so in spots. I felt like the plot stretched plausibility more than I could go along with willingly, too. The central conflict — a young man’s scandalous, proposed marriage to his aunt — didn’t seem like a scrape these sensible Eliots would ever get themselves into. They’re too preternaturally smart, too perceptive, too well-read (and forever quoting great literature to one another).

This article provides a fuller summary of the plot, as well as some interesting background about the novel’s origin. It seems that Ms. Goudge ran aground in the midst of writing this book. “At one point I reached deadlock. Usually my characters manipulate me, not I them, but now they suddenly went dead as dormice. I could see no way through, and nothing that could possibly happen next,” she explains. She prayed that she would dream the rest of the story — and then did.

Despite my few complaints, I have to say again that I did enjoy reading it. It doesn’t have the same depth as The Dean’s Watch, but it does have the same wonderful description of places, with exact and loving attention to detail as well as sensitivity to the spirit and history of a given place. And though it felt somewhat heavy-handed in getting its point across, the point is certainly a worthy one: given the option of being true to your personal passions, or true to the faithful love that holds a family together, the latter is the better choice — even if, as David Eliot complains, such an approach is old-fashioned. It’s his grandmother Lucilla’s generation that moves from the outside in, living according to external forms (the relevant one being marriage here) and eventually finding love. David’s generation moves from the inside out, a more selfish route that may involve shattering the social forms, and the other people around you, while you pursue your allegiance to “the truth as I see it.”

I’m not sure where to go next in my personal Elizabeth Goudge reading seminar. The White Witch, universally regarded as one of her best novels? Pilgrim’s Inn, the next book about the Eliots? Or should I wait a few days till my copy of her autobiography, The Joy of Snow, arrives in the mail? Some of the details of setting and character in The White Witch are apparently drawn from Rose Cottage, Goudge’s last residence. Probably the best order would be to finish out the Eliot series, then read the autobiography, then read The White Witch. But I haven’t completely made up my mind.

The Dean’s Watch is my second novel by Elizabeth Goudge. Its subject is the life of a community in a hilltop city (based on Ely) overlooking the fen country of England. The watch named in the title belongs to the dean of the town’s magnificent cathedral, and it is one of the first things we encounter in the story’s opening setting: a clock shop. The title suggests as well that the story’s main concern is what happens during his tenure or “watch” as dean. The balance between the affairs of linear time, and things of eternal value, is the source of some of the tale’s richest moments.

More leisurely than The Scent of Water, and with a more complicated tapestry of characters at all levels of the social scale, it prompted me more than once to compare it with a Dickens novel. Both Goudge and Dickens share a keen insight into personality, but unlike Dickens who indulges an often ruthless satire, Goudge writes with disinterested compassion not just for her favorites, but for the whole range of her characters. And where Dickens novels entertain fantastic twists and coincidences as their plots are shaped to serial form, The Dean’s Watch is anchored in the plausible. It’s also less sentimental than the Dickens tales that spring to mind.

The two authors’ treatments of Christian themes differ too. Dickens’ style of Christianity values social activism, and his satire is often designed to expose hypocrisy that blinds or paralyzes people who profess faith. But Goudge, though she too reveals the wounds and limitations that keep her characters from fully realizing their faith, writes compellingly of how they work to grow beyond their limitations.

(Now that I’ve written all this about Dickens, it strikes me that Trollope’s Barchester might make for a more promising comparison…)

I liked the juxtaposition of watches and clocks with the eternal as the characters learn the lasting art of loving. Present and past are juxtaposed as well: Adam, Isaac, Job, Abraham — Goudge’s biblical names are scattered everywhere and help to reinforce the perspective of human life as a ship sailing in a timeless sea. Some moments jump into a fuller life for the characters, moments when they feel the weight of significance and seem to feel everything more vividly, and we come to recognize these as moments when the veil is pulled aside.

The centrality of the cathedral itself, set atop the city and overlooking the affairs of men, is established early through the second chapter’s summary of its history. Its occasionally ominous darkness — in silhouette against the sky, or in its vast interior, which is so dark that the rood is a strongly felt presence never fully visible — becomes a way of characterizing the eternal and the mysterious.

Two of the story’s main characters, Dean Adam Ayscough and Miss Montague, see their prayer life in similar terms. The dean reflects,

There was of course that other thing, that power that had been given him of taking hold of an evil situation, wrestling with it, shaking it as a terrier shakes a rat until the evil fell out of it and fastened on himself. Then he carried the evil on his own shoulders to the place of prayer, carried it up a long hill in darkness, but willingly. Each time he felt himself alone, yet each time when the weight became too much for him it was shared, then lifted, as though he had never been alone.

Similarly, Mary Montague’s key decision in life, the decision to learn to pray, is represented as both an acceptance of darkness, and a willingness to bear others’ burdens:

She whose prayer until now had been the murmuring of soothing and much-loved words in the tired intervals between one thing and another, or the presentation to Almighty God of inventories of the needs of the city as she drove about it in her pony carriage, abandoned herself for the sake of those she loved to silence and dark, understanding however dimly that to draw some tiny fraction of the sin of the world into her own being with this darkness was to do away with it.

I ran across a similar idea of “substitutionary prayer” (?) in Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell, and feel I have a glimmering of understanding of it — though not a deep one by any means. I love these passages that speak of prayer as something one does with God, rather than something one says to God.

I digress. But this is why I blog: to remember what strikes me the most in what I read. This quiet, thoughtful, insightful book moves slowly; at times, it functioned like a hand held up in resistance to quick or careless reading. Perhaps the slow pace afforded this tale its gentleness, because at times I found my eyes wet without being sure what was so moving to me. It seemed to soak in deeply without my knowing it.

The Scent of Water (1963) is, as the back cover promises, an enchanting book. How have I lived this long without ever even hearing of Elizabeth Goudge? Now that I have an acquaintance with her, I want to read more right away.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… First, in a nutshell, the story:

Mary Lindsay, around 50, inherits a country house after World War II from an aunt she barely knew. She feels compelled not to sell it, but to leave her comfortable London flat and live at The Laurels in the hamlet of Appleshaw, where she visited only once, for a few hours, as a child with her father. She uncovers the history of the place, gets acquainted with her neighbors in the close-knit little community, and pieces together the fuller picture of her aunt from journals she left behind.

I loved it, for several reasons. First, it’s deeply satisfying and comforting because it tackles some serious subjects: mental illness, marital struggle, blindness and suffering, encroaching urbanization and the loss of country life, compulsion, and plain complicated human relationships. These are potentially “modern” subjects, but they are not handled in the agonizingly introspective, slow-paced manner of many modern novels. The pace moves quickly, and we are given the decisions and events without having to endure the stream of minutia in the interior lives of the characters.

Second, it’s hopeful. Part of Mary’s journey into the country is spiritual; part is relational; part is anthropological. (She wants to experience rural England before it disappears entirely.) She, and the other characters in the novel, are mostly successful on all counts. The novel takes its title from a passage in the book of Job:

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

Appleshaw, as blind veteran Paul Randall points out, has more of the scent of water than most places. It bodes well for the characters, and for the story.

Finally, this is a book about the past. Anyone who loves old houses, or old places, and the “secret garden-ish” magic that clings to them, will love getting lost in these pages. The house and gardens Mary inherits have a most interesting history, and the description invokes all the best of my own beloved old places: There’s my grandmother’s house with its two staircases and numerous nooks and crannies. There’s the library in the town where I grew up — a mansion complete with an ornate banister, creaking staircases, oodles of rooms, and a park surrounding it. And there’s the playhouse a cousin of my grandmother’s built for his daughter, who grew to adulthood and died of cancer before I ever met her. I still remember standing inside the tiny cottage as a child, staring at the orderly rows of beautiful dishes, the little table spread with its cloth, the child-sized hutch painted white, the latticed windows.

The Laurels is reached through a green door in a stone wall bordering the Appleshaw village green. The pathway to the house is shaded by a giant wisteria growing over a lattice. It has a conservatory. Its furniture and other treasures have stories. We are treated to the view from its windows, tours of its gardens, and tales of its history that made me want desperately to live there myself.

Alexander Pope spoke of “the genius of the place.” This novel explores the idea that a place can take on the spirit of its inhabitants in ways that outlast them. It’s a marvelous book, poetic and mystical in spots, and highly evocative of an era long past.