Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge

Her characters channel folktales and legend through their lives and their connections with others. Folklore and poetry, transcendent experience, and glimpses of the immanent pervade them, and her characters-especially the youngest and the oldest-slip between these worlds easily. Yet in all her work the boundaries between worlds are thin. The children’s books are all set in a version of our real world, too, though her towns and landscapes in them are imaginary. With the exception of her children’s books, most of her work is not what most people would think of as fantasy. And she rarely if ever does what the reader expects. It is, however, often surprising and sometimes startling. Her work is not showy and it is not melodramatic. Indeed, I’m not sure she deals in good and bad at all: she writes rather about compassion and understanding and resolution through empathy.

Lewis) she never preaches, nor lays out moral parameters, and, to paraphrase Louisa Alcott, she does not reward the “good” with gilded treats and the “bad” with dire punishments. But I ask them to bear with me-and with her-for unlike many of the best known religious writers (including C. I can at this point hear some readers of this turning away. Goudge was a devout Christian and her faith informs all of her works. The central concern in all of them, however, is the life of the spirit, and the blending of the mundane and the transcendent, and all of them are in certain ways profoundly magical.

Some were set against historical backgrounds, including all her children’s books others have contemporary settings. For most of her career, moreover, the idea of genre was minor, and all her books were published as mainstream novels. Goudge-like Dodie Smith and Rumer Godden, two more of my lifelong writers-wrote for both adults and children, although I suspect these days it is mainly her children’s books for which she is known. I reread it last week, as I prepared to write this piece, and found it as engaging and magical as I always did. It was one of my favourite books as a child, and it remains a book I consider essential to my personal library. I was five or six when I first encountered her, via her Carnegie Medal–winning children’s book, The Little White Horse. But there are a handful who have stayed with me lifelong, in whose books I continue to find new things. There are writers I read and reread as a teenager, in my twenties, in my thirties, whom I still love, but no longer need to read. A writer who spoke to you directly at one age can fade as your circumstances change, while another writer who was formerly less appealing may reveal new value. But sometimes you find that, over time, these change.

Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge