The first volume (of two) of Rumer Godden’s autobiography ends in 1945, with her return to England; it takes Anne Chisholm 9 of 15 chapters to get that far, a good indication that for Chisholm, Godden’s life in India is the important part of the story. Her novels A Fugue in Time and China Court, both set in England, receive about a sentence each, while any books set in India are described in greater detail, and Chisholm devotes a whole chapter to a firsthand account of Godden’s 1994 visit to India to make a BBC documentary. Perhaps because Godden wrote for both children and adults, this biography’s opening suggests that Chisholm had a dual audience in mind, but the later accounts of failed marriages and multiple house moves would not be very interesting to young readers. I’ll look for a biography that pays more attention to the writing.

...Masterpiece, sends one into a deep vortex where you think deeply about yourself... and what's real to you and what's not... Also gives you an opportunity to cope with whatever "hazardous" event that has ever happened to you... pick yourself and move forward is the main message of this book.

19 January 2011 -- enjoyed this biography immensely.

Biographies are very hard to make readable. This one simply did it. I will look for more by Ms. Chisholm; but in particular, her rendering of Ms. Godden made the excellence of Godden's prose all the better for me.

Prior to this book I only knew of Rumer Godden as the author of a couple of children’s books. Her life turned out to be much more complex than I was expecting

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A happy childhood is always a paradise lost. The English children of the Indian Empire knew a special paradise, and most of them never forgot it and always missed it. Over and over again in the memories of people who grew up in India the same longings and vivid recollections recur: they remember the warmth, the sun, the colours, the light, the space, the sound; above all, perhaps, the smell of India.

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Although Rumer Godden spent much of her life in England, many readers associate her with India - and the books she wrote which were inspired by her experiences there. (My own Godden bibliography has been heavily weighted towards the Indian books: The Lady and the Unicorn, Black Narcissus, The River and the memoir Two Under the Indian Sun.) I read this biography immediately after finishing Rumer and Jon Godden's memoir of their childhood in Narayanganj (then British India, now Bangladesh), and as the biographer borrowed heavily from that book, this book didn't get off to a particularly promising start for me. However, there was far more to this complicated woman's life than those childhood experiences, and soon enough I found myself in fresh and uncharted territory.

Although it's not the most exhaustive of biographies, Chisholm does a solid job of covering the complicated time-line of Godden's life, and fitting in the books as well - but without giving too much of their plots away. India provides a book-end for Godden's life, and a personal connection for the biographer, as very late in Godden's life, Anne Chisholm accompanies her and a BBC film crew to the places in India which had impacted Godden's childhood and young married years.

Godden had a terrific work ethic, and it was her habit and ritual to begin a new book every New Year's Eve. She wrote obsessively as a child, and published her first novel Chinese Puzzle when she was only 28. One of the novels she is best known for, Black Narcissus, was only her third novel, but after this first taste of writing fame - it was later adapted into both a stage play and film - she not only became a professional writer, but also the main financial support of both of her marriages. Although she had two daughters by her first husband, and took care of other family children during the years - especially during World War II, which she spent in India - she was always first and foremost a writer. Nevertheless, she didn't spend her life locked away in a study. She had a life full of a great many things and experiences.

Chisholm takes care to point out that Godden was prone to dramatising her own life - to shaping it into a story, and thus losing or blurring the factual aspects of what had happened. Throughout the book, she relies on other a variety of other testimonies - and not just Godden's point of view. I felt this book benefitted from the author's first-hand knowledge of her subject, without being slavish to it. Chisholm has fondness and respect for Godden, but she maintains distance, too.

I love the smaller or more personal details, and these are a few that I will remember from this biography. Rumer Godden loved pugs, Famous Grouse whisky, and furnishing houses. Despite the love of houses, (or perhaps because of it), she moved many times over the years. She lived in Lamb House, in Rye, a house associated with many writers - including Henry James. She converted to Catholicism later in life and wrote several books about nuns and the spiritual life. She was a hardy traveller. She wrote many children's books, and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well. She lived in Jean Renoir's house in California when they were working together on a screenplay for her novel The River.

Godden wrote three memoirs about her own life, and I intend on reading all of them. Perhaps this biography will seem more like an outline in comparison, but it's certainly a good jumping-off point for a British writer whose writing definitely deserves a revival.

I read Rumer Godden's books, mostly about dolls, as a child, but wasn't familiar with her as a person or author of adult literature. A friend gave me a copy of Prayers from the Ark, and I was intrigued enough by this encounter of Rumer with Carmen Bemos de Gasztold, that I wanted to find out more. There isn't much about that encounter, but I enjoyed learning about Rumer's life, especially in India. I have always wanted to rent a houseboat in Kashmir, so that part of the book was especially enthralling. Overall, this book gave me a first look at this interesting author, and I would like to learn more about her, and maybe even read some of her adult literature. For now, I'm settling into re-reading The Doll's House...

I have enjoyed a number of Rumer Godden's books and read the first volume of her autobiography a few years ago, so this caught my attention when I spotted a used copy. I thought Anne Chisholm did a pretty good job of telling Rumer Godden's life story and giving me a feel for her character. She had access to Rumer herself, her friends and family, and family papers, so the biography comes across as quite authoritative. Rumer's life was so bound up with India that in some ways the book is as much about the country as the person. I find the history of British India fascinating, so it is no surprise that I enjoyed the read. I was disappointed, though, in the treatment of Rumer's conversion to Catholicism. I wanted to know about her spiritual journey and the impact of faith on her character and writing, but the biography glossed over this. Her conversion was mentioned but never really explained.

Rumer Godden, a not-so-well-known name now, occupies an odd space in British literary history. Immensely popular in her own lifetime, she enjoyed fame and some fortune. Her work received mixed critical reviews, often more appreciated in America than in her native England, and quite a few of her books were adapted for the screen during her lifetime. She’s not unknown enough to be championed by recovery presses like Persephone books (plenty of her books are still in print), nor is she known enough to be remembered alongside her contemporaries like Muriel Spark. There’s also the unevenness in her work, for she published dozens of children’s books in addition to dozens of novels, and some of her books are marked by sensuality and drama, others by quietude and spirituality. Between her childhood in India and a peripatetic adulthood, the expanse of Godden’s life is difficult to grasp.

Chisholm had the advantage of writing that key biography published close to the end of the subject’s life. Godden was in her final year of life when Chisholm published A Storyteller’s Life. Most of the biography’s weaknesses can be attributed to the advantage of Chisholm’s personal relationship with Godden, the interviews she conducted, and the access to Godden’s archives. While this access gives the biography a surplus of primary sources, it’s also a hindrance, as Chisholm admits. The Goddens are fairly private people. Self-editing in interviews and recollections is inevitable. Conflicts over portrayals and how much to reveal abound. Yet, Chisholm often cuts through this, though she ends up with an uneven biography in some places, depending on what information she was given by her living, feisty subject.

Godden’s life is far too dramatic for me to summarize here, but in this biography you’ll find her stormy marriage, a murder attempt, a sojourn in Hollywood, a house fire, and a conversion. She wrote far too many books for each to be considered at length in this biography. Certain more autobiographical novels, Chisholm placed alongside the real-life events. Some resurface when Godden becomes involved in adapting a story for the screen. Others are barely mentioned. Having met Godden by reading In This House of Brede, I was pleased to find a whole chapter on this novel and Godden’s connection to Stanbrook Abbey, through which she wrote the story. Godden received special access to the cloistered order, and submitted her manuscript for review to the nuns, who enthusiastically supported her efforts. She ensured they received a good portion of the profits. (Brede was adapted into a movie starring Diana Rigg, and is available for free on YouTube. It’s but a pale sliver of the novel, but a respectable effort.)

In reading this biography, I hoped to find the “key” to why two of Godden’s later novels, In This House of Brede and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, are favorites, but I found Black Narcissus, her early breakout novel, to be a mediocre reading experience. While Godden's craft as a writer is consistent, the three novels, all populated by nuns, had markedly different characters, and overall psychological aesthetics. This “key” became apparent when Chisholm quoted a 1941 letter from Godden to her sister Jon:

“I never long to be a man as much as in my writing, because I should have a man’s wholeness. To me that is what a woman can never be; I think she can never be whole, whole physically or whole hearted. If she is whole then she is useless as a woman. She must be continually impaired; by marriage, by children, by duties and ties; drained, as she is drained by her menses each month...complete wholeness is male, a woman cannot hope to achieve it and the lack of it shows in her work...Men have this robust easy power and they do not even know that they have it; it is an unconscious lordliness. It is no use resenting it. I do not resent it. I can only recognise it and do what is within my power. Anything else would be hideous.” (119)

My own disagreement with this idea notwithstanding, I find this passage enlightening regarding why Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus was but a pale glimmer in comparison to the radiant Sister Philippa in Brede and Soeur Marie-Lise in Five for Sorrow. In between writing these novels, Godden lived 30-40 years in which she ended her marriage, wrote many other books, moved continents, endured a war, remarried and converted to Roman Catholicism. (Brede alone marks her as one of the premier Roman Catholic novelists of all time.) Godden’s “concept of woman,” to borrow the apt phrase of philosopher Sister Mary Prudence Allen, RSM, changed distinctly over these years. Chisholm doesn’t pick up this throughline in Godden’s life, but perhaps future critics and biographers will examine it.

In Black Narcissus, a nun is plagued by sexual obsession, and her sisters each experience a loss of purpose and religious vitality during their failed mission. At this point, Godden is not interested much in the religious life of the sisters. She refers to their Lenten fast and other observances, but the interior, spiritual life that enlivens her later convent novels is absent. The central conflicts in both Brede and Five for Sorrow involve an older woman’s ties to a younger woman. While neither tie is motherhood, each novel finds the breaking of this tie releasing the older woman to freedom. In Brede, Sister Philippa is freed from an unhealthy (in cloistered life) relationship so she can serve all her sisters more freely, eventually accepting the call to begin a convent in Japan, the home of her youth. In Five for Sorrow, Soeur Marie-Lise is nearly murdered by her “tie” while she is experiencing religious ecstasy, though her life is saved by another sister who clings to her. She accepts this tie, and still loves her attempted murder tie, but the ending is rather open after that.

Godden’s “concept of woman” did not experience a complete change: she still finds this sense of un-wholeness in the human person. Upon her conversion, however, she began to find a possibility for fulfillment by giving up the conventional means of making whole (marriage and motherhood). Little wonder that the cloistered life held such appeal for Godden later in life; these conventional means had done little for her. What changed from Black Narcissus to Brede was, according to Chisholm, that Godden “believed deeply in the truth and importance both of what the nuns were doing and what she was doing in writing about them.” (269)

Black Narcissus foretells the end of the British imperialist project. At that point in her life, Godden knew little of Indian culture outside what she experienced in relationships with her servants and the mixed-race young women to whom she taught dancing. Her brief time working at an agricultural college supplied the character of the energetic young student whose perfume gives the novel its title. The nuns’ mission becomes a miniature portrait of the failure of the British Raj. Yet, to my eyes, Godden does not supply anything substantial to supplant imperialism. She treats native Indians as a collective, who will hardly remember the ephemeral touch of Britain on their lives. Later in life, she encountered India in a more holistic way, lived in Kashmir for a time during WWII, and saw much more of the world outside the limited interactions of servitude. Simply put, Black Narcissus isn’t about the religious life, which is why I still find it so disappointing as a novel. While it may stand on its own alongside other British novels like A Passage to India, in Godden’s corpus, it fades in comparison to the pure luminance of Brede and Five for Sorrow. I think I could have encountered it better had I read it with other novels about British imperialism, rather than as a book by Godden, where I can't escape comparing it to her later novels. Hopefully my re-read, perhaps accompanied by Forster, will do justice to it.

I enjoyed learning more about Godden’s life, and the extent of her writing. Someday I hope to find a copy of A Storyteller’s Life to add to my library, but like many of Godden’s books, it’s out of print. I recommend this biography to Godden fans, not just because it’s the only biography of her, but also because it gave me a good picture of Godden as a person.

Fascinating life of a difficult woman. Explains why I found her books so riveting as a girl. Can't wait to read more of them.

This biography emphasizes Godden's years in India. Her life was fascinating, often troubled, sometimes dangerous. It will be enlightening to lovers of her fiction.

This is an informative, sympathetic, but not uncritical, biography of a prolific and long-lived author whose life was more than usually filled with incident. It was fascinating to read about the people and places that inspired Rumer Godden's wonderful novels and to learn about what she thought of the films that helped to make them famous. Rumer Godden emerges as a fascinating, determined, but often difficult woman.

Of a total of 311 pages, 233 are devoted to her life up to 1950 (when she was helping with the filming of "The River"). My only quibble with this part of the book is that we hear a good deal about (and from) a number of people whose connection with Rumer Godden seems tenuous, especially in the chapter on her life in Calcutta, presumably in the interests of atmosphere. There is a fascinating account of her time in Kashmir, from which we learn that "Kingfisher's Catch Fire" is a scarcely fictionalised account of a real incident.

The part of the book which deals with her post 1950 life is less satisfactory, though there is a good chapter on her connections with Stanbrook Abbey - the convent that inspired "In This House of Brede", and an entertaining and moving account of her final trip to India in 1994, which was filmed for, and prompted by, a BBC documentary. However, at times this part of the book reads almost like a Christmas round-robin letter in its summaries of family events and the many removals from one home to another.

Anne Chisholm seems to take little interest in most of the books Rumer Godden wrote during the second half of her life. For example, she gets the name of the main character of "An Episode of Sparrows" wrong, and is very dismissive of this book, which is a favourite of mine. As probably the first of Rumer Godden's novels to feature a Catholic church and priest strongly I think it warranted more attention since Catholicism played a big part in her later life.

Similarly, there is very little about most of her non-fiction or books for children, of the latter only "The Diddakoi" rates more than a passing mention. I should have liked to learn more about some of these books and their illustrators. For instance, although we learn that a soldier son-in-law of Rumer Godden spent time in Cyprus, Anne Chisholm seems to be unaware that "Operation Sippacik" is set there, and was no doubt partly inspired by stories he told his mother-in-law.

However, overall this is a very interesting book, and I did learn about Rumer Godden books (and films of them) that I had never even heard of and will look out for in future.