Misplaced: The Fantasies and Fortunes of Elizabeth Goudge

In Elizabeth Goudge’s novel Linnets and Valerians, characters exhibit a rather extreme, if not alarming, tendency to disappear. Except for an occasional moonlit stroll in her garden, Lady Alicia has spent the past thirty years living in strict seclusion in the upstairs rooms of the genteelly decaying Valerian manor house. Ever since her son and husband were lost, she has shunned company and has been seen by no one except her faithful servant and companion Moses. Young Francis Valerian vanished mysteriously at the age of eight while playing on Lion Tor, the magnificent rock formation behind his home. His father went astray three years later while exploring the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Ironically, Elizabeth Goudge’s reputation seems to have suffered the tragedy so many of her characters struggle against; she too has been misplaced and forgotten, at least as an author of children’s literature.

In her day, however, her books for both young and old were greeted with enthusiasm and accolades. Goudge’s novels celebrate the every day life of her characters—usually, but not always, large families of energetic and strong-willed children. But to say that Goudge specializes in reality, is not to say that her characters are conventional or their experiences are ordinary; for Goudge, real life is magical. In her novels, the kingdoms of childhood joy and belief expand to envelop adults at the same time as the moral ambiguities of the grown-up world provide rich pastures for the adventurous young protagonists. Although this collapsing or confusion of worlds sometimes provides trouble for those intent on categorizing novels as “Children’s,” “Young Adult,” or “Adult,” it enables Goudge to put her uses of the magical to some unusual purposes—including the exploration of class and economic justice. Her descriptions of the rich and wild English countryside and the idiosyncratic and splendidly detailed inns, cottages, and castles in which her protagonists dwell is also one of her greatest strengths. And best of all are her wonderfully memorable characters.

In 1946 Goudge’s The Little White Horse won the Carnegie Medal, by some measures the most prestigious of Commonwealth awards in the field. However, while the American counterpart, the Newbery Medal, endows its recipients with something akin to literary immortality (virtually every public and school library purchases the winning books and many bookstores devote special shelf space to decades worth of past winners), the Carnegie Medal falls, according to one scholar of its recipients, “far short of it in impact on authors, publishers, and the world at large” (Crouch 184). But even recognition from the American Library Association and reviews which range from glowing to blazing in virtually every journal from Horn Book to The New York Times Book Review have been inadequate to sustain her popularity. A quick peek at the indexes of a half-dozen of the anthologies and texts prepared for classroom use as well as a glance at some of the more prominent authors and editors of children’s literature surveys like John Townsend, Roger Sale, and Cornelia Meigs reveals that she is mentioned at best in passing, and more frequently, not at all.

Goudge is herself, perhaps, in part to blame. Even her own autobiography, The Joy of Snow, fails to mention most of her children’s novels. But a fuller explanation of her disappearance may be attributed to the vagaries and limitations of the term “children’s literature” and its sibling “young adult literature.” Goudge was both a prolific and varied author. She was born in England in 1900, and at her death in 1984 she had published over forty volumes (not counting the many anthologies of her work). These books include poetry, plays, collections of short stories, religious studies, novels, and the aforementioned autobiography. The editor of Twentieth Century Children’s Writers defines ten of these works as publications for children, but other critics have not always agreed. Some of the confusion is caused by the fact that almost all of Elizabeth Goudge’s work features substantive child characters. As John Gough argues, “For Goudge, adults and children alike share...