Goudge, Elizabeth

(British, 1900–84)

Elizabeth Goudge lived in Wells, Ely, and Oxford as a child, and became a full-time writer in 1938. She wrote ten children's books, which were among her best work. The Little White Horse (1947) is a tale about Maria Merryweather's adventures at Moonacre Manor. Like many children's novels written after the Second World War, it believes in the restorative power of faith, particularly that of a child's. She has also written fourteen novels for adults, the best of which fuse religion with ideas about myth and magic. See Green Dolphin Country (1944), set in the Channel Islands and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, and telling of the love of two sisters for one man; The White Witch (1960), which pitches the Roundheads against the Cavaliers, in a pro-Royalist love-story; and A Child from the Sea (1970), which portrays the life of Lucy Walter, the wronged wife of Charles II. In later years she turned to religious non-fiction, and wrote her autobiography, The Joy of Snow, in 1974.

Daphne du Maurier, Norah Lofts, Phyllis Bentley  SB