(C. Walter Hodges illustration from our new copy of ‘The Little White Horse’)
This week I am very pleased to be writing about one of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Goudge. We’ve just received six copies of her novels into the shop and seeing each of the familiar titles brought back many happy memories.
Goudge certainly has a unique way of bringing a sense of place to life in her writing. Perhaps the most pertinent of these (at least to this blog!) is her description from her 1936 novel ‘A City of Bells’:
‘“A bookseller," said Grandfather, "is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. There come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all....Yes....It's a great vocation....Moreover his life is one of wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there's no death in a bookseller's shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left.”’
Despite being celebrated by many of the great writers of the fantasy genre (‘The Little White Horse’ is one of J.K. Rowling’s favourite books), and her Carnegie Medal win, which sets her alongside writers such as C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, Goudge was often criticised during her life as being both overly sentimental and a “low fantasy” writer. Allegedly, she promoted old fashioned Victorian ideals, despite writing in the mid-twentieth century.
(Illustration from our new copy of ‘Henrietta’s House’)
Goudge herself was undeterred by this criticism and continued to write throughout her life, never being put off from her own ethos, which was to write books that offered her numerous readers a way to escape from their reality. In her own words:
‘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.’
Needless to say, with the Second World War taking place during the publication of her many novels, at times this must have seemed like a daunting, as well as a necessary task.
(Internal cover from our new copy of ‘Gentian Hill’)
Of course, as time has gone on, the concept of “low fantasy” (a.k.a. fantasy rooted in the real world) has gone on to dominate children’s fiction, with writers like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett both publishing novels that sit firmly within this genre.
It therefore seems that we may have Goudge to thank for much of the 21st century’s most popular fiction, which simply goes to show that we should listen less to the strictures of society and instead acknowledge, in line with Goudge herself, that “there is something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.”
(C. Walter Hodges illustration from our new copy of ‘The Little White Horse’)