Rumer Godden

English writer of novels, short stories, children's stories, and nonfiction.

• Born: December 10, 1907
• Place of birth: Eastbourne, Sussex, England
• Died: November 8, 1998
• Place of death: Thornhill, Dumfriesshire (now Dumfries and Galloway), Scotland

Biography

The fact that Margaret Rumer Godden spent significant portions of her early life both in England and in India exerted a resonant influence on her literary work. This becomes clear in Two under the Indian Sun (1966), written with her older sister Jon Godden, an account of a five-year period of their childhood in the Bengal town of Narayangunj, eleven miles from Dacca. Born in Eastbourne, Sussex, at an uncle’s house, Godden was the second of four daughters of Arthur Leigh Godden, a steamer agent, and Katherine Norah Hingley, who came from a hardworking Quaker family from the English Midlands. (The name Rumer is a family name from the novelist’s maternal grandmother.) At the age of six months Godden was taken to India with her family, and she spent her first five years happily there. In 1913, however, in accord with the British practice of sending children back to England for education, she and one of her sisters were sent to their paternal grandmother’s home in Maida Vale, London. When World War I made it dangerous for the two sisters to remain in London, they returned to India in November 1914.

While the two girls were at their grandmother’s house in England, they were exposed to a rather strict religious routine and spent much time in and around St. Augustine’s Church. After returning to India, they did not attend church except on holidays, but during Godden’s time in London Christianity had impressed itself deeply on her consciousness, along with an awareness of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. At one time she even considered becoming a nun or missionary. The contrasts between the sacred and the profane, holiness and corruption, and the clash between Eastern and Western cultures were to become abiding concerns in her novels and undoubtedly grew out of this early period of her life. For a time in her youth, Godden took trained intensively as a dancer, and she studied ballet at several schools in England.

Godden was already composing poems and stories by the age of five. She also engaged in highly imaginative play with her sisters and absorbed vivid details from the Indian landscape—the coasts, the Himalayan peaks, cities, houses, and buildings—that later found powerful expression in her novels. Indeed, some critics have noted that places interested her more than people. Yet if Godden admired and remembered India’s exotic beauty, she was equally impressed with the crueler aspects of Indian life she observed, including the prevalence of disease and the pervasiveness of death. In this early period of her life Godden and her sisters were ruled by a rather fierce Anglo-Indian nurse, Nana, who fascinated the children with fantastic tales. Godden’s experience with Nana, and with others she met while in India, left a lasting impression on her. Though she left India in 1920, she would return in visits and in her imagination for years to come.

When Godden was twelve years old, she returned to England with her sisters and passed from school to school. During this unhappy time she discovered that she could gain the attention of other children by telling stories. The Godden sisters’ misery was deepened by the cruel treatment they received at the hands of the nuns at St. Monica’s School. Godden later took literary revenge in Black Narcissus (1939) and In This House of Brede (1969), though she also presents a positive vision of convent life in Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (1979). Eventually she adjusted when she went to Moira House in Sussex, a school with a more liberal view of education and without the oppressive discipline and curriculum of most English schools of that era. The school’s vice principal recognized her abilities and encouraged her to develop her writing talent.

Godden wrote throughout her unsettled school years. By the age of fifteen she had published a booklet of verse and an advertisement. After completing her schooling, she returned to India in 1925. Three years later, at the age of twenty-one, she opened the Peggy Godden School of Dance in Calcutta. The school was open to both Indian and British children, contrary to the custom of the time. In 1934 Godden married Laurence Sinclair Foster, a stockbroker, in Calcutta. She was pregnant when she married, but the child, a boy named David, died shortly after birth.

Godden's first novel, Chinese Puzzle (1936), was accepted for publication in 1935, the same year that her first daughter, Jane, was born. A second daughter, Paula, was born in 1938 in Cornwall. After her first major success with Black Narcissus and the start of World War II, Godden returned to India with her children. Her marriage to Foster effectively ended in 1941 when he left her to join the army, leaving her to deal with her gambling debt. By July 1941 she had retreated to a house near the Himalayas, where she lived until March 1942, when she and her children moved to a small farmhouse in Kashmir. They remained there for several years before returning to England permanently in 1945. The River (1946), perhaps Godden's best book, appeared the next year.

In 1949, after the death of her husband, she married James L. Haynes-Dixon. The couple lived in several different houses in Buckinghamshire and at Highgate Village near London, several of which they renovated. All the while Godden continued to write, lecture, garden, and give time and attention to her family. In the late 1960s she was invited by the National Trust to move into Lamb House, which was at one time the residence of Henry James. Haynes-Dixon died in 1975; two years later, Godden moved to southern Scotland to live with her daughter Jane and devote her energies to her writing.

During Godden’s long and prolific writing career, her books were admired for their lucid prose, their delicately detailed depictions of place, their treatment of significant themes, and, most of the time, their vivid characterizations. Godden wrote eloquently about the cultural clashes between the upper-middle-class English and the local Indian society. The Lady and the Unicorn (1937) implicitly indicts English society for its attitudes toward those of mixed race, and this theme is again treated compellingly in The River and in a short story called “Tightrope” (1953). The first novel to bring international acclaim for Godden was Black Narcissus, in which she treats human conflicts between spiritual and fleshly desire with sharp acuteness. In this novel, five sisters of the Anglican Order of the Servants of Mary go to the General’s Palace at Mopu to establish a school and hospital. The sisters’ venture at Mopu fails because they cannot reconcile themselves to the strange and alien culture, nor are they able to establish a real community among themselves. Lacking love and harmony, they are unable to help themselves and so fail to help others. This highly symbolic novel, though somewhat overly allegorical, is a carefully crafted work. It is, in the view of many readers, Godden’s masterpiece. One of its main characters, Sister Clodagh, also introduced a character type that recurred in several subsequent novels—that of the determined woman without a man, whose power most often has no positive outlet and who consequently becomes a corrosive force on those around her as well as upon herself. One of the most destructive but memorable of these women is Madame Barbe de Longuemare, the central character of Gypsy, Gypsy (1940). She has lost too much; her bitterness spills over into envy of youth, beauty, and vitality. Mythlike, she decides she can only renew her own strength by corrupting innocence, and her victim is a young gypsy camping on her land.

Far more sympathetic but ultimately more destructive are women who attempt to defy convention by leaving their husbands, such as Mrs. Grey in The Greengage Summer (1958), and Fanny Clavering of The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963). Still other women characters defy male authority but finally recognize the error of their ways. Godden brings these characters powerfully to life. A notable exception to this characteristic pattern is Lise, the central character of Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy. Formerly a prostitute and madam in an elegant house in Paris, Lise eventually kills her lover to protect the girl Vivi, a waif whom she had rescued from the streets.

In several novels Godden reveals her deep sympathy with children. In An Episode of Sparrows (1955) she created a moving story about two street children who make a garden bloom in their sterile surroundings. In other novels, too, Godden displays her sympathy for abandoned or persecuted children. Such characters appear in A Fugue in Time (1945), Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), The Greengage Summer, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, and The Diddakoi (1972), and in such short stories as “Down Under the Thames,” and “You Needed to Go Upstairs.” Godden’s treatment of these children resembles Charles Dickens’s depictions of persecuted waifs and perhaps derives from a similar source.

Undoubtedly Godden’s capacity to maintain a vital imaginative link with her own childhood accounted not only for her success in writing about childhood but in writing for children as well. After 1945 she became increasingly focused on writing for children. Such works as The Doll’s House (1947), The Mousewife (1951), Impunity Jane (1954), and many others have become highly popular, and some have achieved the status of classics. She also produced two volumes of autobiography, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (1987) and A House with Four Rooms (1989).

As a result of these works and her novels, Godden was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. In 1994 she made a last trip to India to participate in a documentary. Her final work, Cromartie v. the God Shiva (1997), tells a story, based on a real-life event, involving a missing statue of the Hindu god Shiva, a Canadian art dealer named Cromartie, an Indian-born lawyer named Michael Dean, and an archaeologist named Artemis with whom he falls in love. Although not her best work, the novel, produced at the age of eighty-nine, solidified Godden’s reputation as a novelist and Indian local colorist.

Godden’s work occupies a more important place in twentieth-century British fiction, however. In writing about such abiding themes as the lost child, the clash of different cultures, and the conflict between flesh and spirit, Godden created a significant body of work worthy of study by critics and readers alike.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Chinese Puzzle, 1936

The Lady and the Unicorn, 1937

Black Narcissus, 1939

Gypsy, Gypsy, 1940

Breakfast with the Nikolides, 1942

A Fugue in Time, 1945 (also known as Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time)

The River, 1946

A Candle for St. Jude, 1948

A Breath of Air, 1950

Kingfishers Catch Fire, 1953

An Episode of Sparrows, 1955

The Greengage Summer, 1958

China Court: The Hours of a Country House, 1961

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, 1963

In This House of Brede, 1969

The Peacock Spring, 1975

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, 1979

The Dark Horse, 1981

Thursday’s Children, 1984

Coromandel Sea Change, 1990

Pippa Passes, 1994

Cromartie v. the God Shiva, 1997

Short Fiction:

Mooltiki, and Other Stories and Poems of India, 1957

Swans and Turtles: Stories, 1968 (also known as Gone: A Thread of Stories)

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love: Stories, 1989 (with Jon Godden; also known as Indian Dust)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

The Doll’s House, 1947

The Mousewife, 1951

Impunity Jane: The Story of a Pocket Doll, 1954

The Fairy Doll, 1956

The Story of Holly and Ivy, 1958

Candy Floss, 1960

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, 1961

Little Plum, 1963

Home Is the Sailor, 1964

The Kitchen Madonna, 1967

Operation Sippacik, 1969

The Diddakoi, 1972

Mr. McFadden’s Hallowe’en, 1975

The Rocking Horse Secret, 1977

A Kindle of Kittens, 1978

The Dragon of Og, 1981

The Valiant Chatti-Maker, 1983

Fu-Dog, 1989

Great Grandfather’s House, 1992

Listen to the Nightingale, 1992

Premlata and the Festival of Lights, 1996

Nonfiction:

Rungli-Rungliot (Thus Far and No Further), 1943 (also known as Rungli-Rungliot Means in Paharia, Thus Far and No Further and Thus Far and No Further)

Bengal Journey: A Story of the Part Played by Women in the Province, 1939–1945, 1945

Two under the Indian Sun, 1966 (with Jon Godden)

Shiva’s Pigeons: An Experience of India, 1972 (with Godden)

The Butterfly Lions: The Story of the Pekingese in History, Legend, and Art, 1977

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, 1987 (autobiography)

A House with Four Rooms, 1989 (autobiography)

Edited Texts:

Round the Day, Round the Year, the World Around: Poetry Programmes for Classroom or Library, 1966 (with Margaret Bell)

A Letter to the World: Poems for Young People, 1968 (by Emily Dickinson)

Mrs. Manders’ Cookbook, 1968 (by Olga Manders)

Bibliography

Chisholm, Anne. Rumer Godden: A Storyteller’s Life. Macmillan, 1998. A biography based on Godden’s autobiographical works and unpublished personal papers as well as extensive interviews. Concentrates on Godden’s life and works and the screenplays made from her fiction. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Dukes, Thomas. “‘Evoking the Significance’: The Autobiographies of Rumer Godden.” Women’s Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1991, pp. 15–35. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5810584&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 May 2017. Discusses Godden’s autobiographical works and the autobiographical quality of her fiction.

Evans, Gwyneth. “The Girl in the Garden: Variations on a Feminine Pastoral.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 1, 1994, pp. 20–24. A detailed analysis of Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows that compares it to The Secret Garden.

Rosenthal, Lynne Meryl. Rumer Godden Revisited. Twayne Publishers, 1996. Explores Godden’s ideas about self-transformation and acts of will.

Simpson, Hassell A. Rumer Godden. Twayne Publishers, 1973. A book-length introduction to Godden’s life and work, giving brief biographical information along with a literary discussion of many of her novels. Good on the early Godden.