Elizabeth Goudge 1900-84

Elizabeth Goudge was a prolific novelist, of the 20th century. She wrote children's books, romances, historical novels, and religious works. She was born in Wells, Somerset, a cathedral city, where her father worked in the Theological college. Her mother was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. One of her earlier books was set in Guernsey. She wrote several books set in Wells, using a fictional name for the city. She was an Anglican, and religion is shown in many of her stories. After her father's death, she looked after her mother. She found it stressful, combining housekeeping with writing. She never married, and moved to Oxfordshire in later years, living with her sister. She died there in 1984. I hope to write more about her works in a later blog. I have just started re reading the White Witch, one of her novels set in the English Civil war. It is about a Puritan gentry family who have relations who are gypsies. Fronica is the cousin of the family and she is uneasily poised between the gypsy lifestyle and the gentry. She lives in a cottage and devotes herself to making herbal medicines and nursing the sick. Her cousin Robert is a gentleman with 2 children, Will and Jenny, and he becomes more and more hostile to the royalist cause and especially hostile to the Church of England. He thinks that Charles I is trying to steer the church towards the Roman Catholic position and forbids his parish priest to wear robes or have any "Catholic" trappings in his services. More will follow.