The other day, while looking for something else, I stumbled across a reference to ‘The Mystery of Moonacre’. Moonacre? That is the name of the secluded valley where my very favourite children’s book, The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge is set. My first reaction was ‘They can’t do this’, but of course they can and indeed they have. I looked further. And yes, they have made a film called The Mystery of Moonacre, which is based roughly – very roughly – on the book. And as far as I can see from the trailer, they’ve ruined it.
Elizabeth Goudge is a writer scarcely heard of today. Yet The Little White Horse, winner of the Carnegie Prize for children’s literature in 1948, is a book many people, including, apparently, J.K. Rowling, remember from childhood with great pleasure.
Goudge was born in 1900 in Wells, in southern England and died in 1984. She led a sheltered, even secluded life. A child of the vicarage – and an only child at that – she turned first to make believe, and then to writing. There seems to be something about vicarage life that fosters a desire to write; think of Jane Austen, the Brontes, or in more modern times, Dorothy Sayers, or Noel Streatfeild. Goudge’s books were based on more overtly Anglican values than those of any of these other vicarage children, but while they inform her writing, they don’t dominate it.
The Goudge family moved fairly frequently as her father climbed up the ecclesiastical career ladder, ending in Oxford, where he became the Regius Professor of Divinity. After he died, Gouge looked after her ailing mother in a cottage in Devon, and after her mother’s death, moved to Oxfordshire. She had a strong sense of place, and this is reflected in her work, so that setting of her books largely matches places she had lived in. ‘It is impossible to live in an old city’, she writes, ‘ and not ask oneself continually, what was it like years ago? What were the men and women and children like who lived in my home centuries ago, and what were their thoughts and their action as they lived out their lives day by day in the place where I live mine now?’
She never married. In her autobiography, Joy of the Snow (1974), there is a hint of a romance when she was living in Ely, but it came to nothing. After her mother died, she agreed to the presence of a companion, Jessie Monroe, to help her through this difficult period. Jessie stayed with her for the rest of her life.
Goudge suffered from bouts of depression. In her later years she was often in poor health. Her last novel, The Child From the Sea, was published in 1970. Yet between 1934 and 1970 she was prolific, producing fifteen major novels, plus twelve children’s books, a number of short stories and some religious non-fiction works.
Some of her books are historical. The Child From the Sea, for example, is about Lucy Walters, in real life the mistress, or possibly the wife, of Charles II, though she died before he was restored to the throne. Lucy was the mother of the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth. Towers in the Mist (1938) deals with Oxford in Elizabethan times. Indeed it is a hymn to Oxford, its colleges and churches, and its surrounding countryside, in the early days of the reign of Elizabeth I, with only a slight, though pleasant, story line.
But most of her books deal with contemporary individuals and families dealing with the stresses of life in England before, during and after World War II. It is here that her Anglicanism shows through. Some of her characters are flawed almost to the point of breakdown, but they are restored through selfless love and support. The capacity for this selflessness is sometimes a quality a character is born with, but it can also be inculcated through prayer and humility, and the determination to live for others.
Such a description makes her books sound sickly and sentimental, but I don’t find that true of the ones I’ve read. This may be because Goudge had suffered her own dark night of the soul, and could write realistically of the experience. The books I know best are the three that concern the Eliots of Damerosehay, and I find them full of compassion and love. The middle book, The Herb of Grace, is my favourite. The ‘herb’ of the title is rue, known in Ophelia’s words as the ‘herb-grace o’ Sundays’, an astringent presence throughout the story. Certainly the characters are mostly middle class, and their dilemmas are existential rather than practical, but this is true of much of British fiction of the time, and their struggles are no less absorbing for that.
And what of The Little White Horse? It is the story of the orphaned Maria Merryweather, who goes to live with her unknown uncle at Moonacre Manor n the West Country. To get what she wants and save Moonacre, Maria has to learn to control her temper and her impatience, and to be brave and truthful. Certainly there is magic – the little white horse proves to be a unicorn, and there is the dog Wrolf who is really a lion, and the ghosts of Merryweathers past hover nearby. But the real magic is in the delight the reader shares with Maria as she discovers the joys of Moonacre, and overcomes the perils. In the film, it seems that the magic has been reduced to a modern preoccupation with witches and elves, and the rightness and symmetry of the story has been lost.
I haven’t seen the film advertised in Australia so far, but I think my best bet would be to stay away if it ever comes here. There was also a TV series made of the book in the 1990s; this may be more faithful to the original.
If you would like to know more about Elizabeth Goudge, there is an Elizabeth Gouge Society in England. This lists her books, and gives more information about her life. Unfortunately most of her work is out of print, though some may be available in libraries or through second hand book shops or websites.
What Book to Read? 
I recently rediscovered Elizabeth Goudge and while I loved her books when I was younger, I find I’m less dazzled by her writing and by her worldview than I used to be. “The Bird in the Tree”, the first in the Eliots of Damerosehay series has so much description in it that for a modern imagination used to the dominance of film and tv, it is actually quite hard to get through in places, and modern editing would make short work of some parts of it. I think also that while for Goudge and her generation personal sacrifice and living for others were essential for personal survival, we now live in a time when thankfully such levels of sacrifice are not usually required in such a direct way. The devastation of world war has passed my generation by, and state care provision, however inadequate, has nevertheless shifted the unquestioned assumption that unmarried daughters should care for their elderly parents, as Goudge herself did.
It’s tempting to almost feel guilty that we lack the qualities that Goudge’s characters have in abundance, and to feel that our lives are somehow less than theirs – but instead we should be grateful for the many and varied opportunities to realise our own gifts and talents, accept that we live in a different world, and understand that self-immolation for the good of others is not something that they necessarily need or want from us. And take the powerful emotional appeal of Goudge’s writing with a pinch of salt!