Not sure if the author was too close to her subject; but has sent me back to the novels.

I picked up this biography for two reasons:

1. I’ve recently begun reading Godden’s novels and love her writing.

2. I’ve lived on-and-off in India, and I’m particularly interested in the British Raj period.

This biography is well written and very readable. Godden certainly led an interesting life and I raced through the book.

My disappointment came for two reasons:

1. There is hardly anything about Godden’s method and philosophy of writing. There’s plenty about her life outside of writing, but the bio makes it seem as if the books just drop from the sky periodically. (There is more about Jean Renoir’s methods and philosophy of filmmaking than about Godden’s writing.) Chisholm goes into detail when it comes to the plots of Godden’s novels, but if you are a fan you’ve already read them (or you mean to and won’t want the spoilers).

Meanwhile, Chisholm goes into detail about EVERY SINGLE change of address over Godden’s long life. It’s interesting to a point, for example when she is moving to a new place in India, but after a while it becomes tedious.

As a writer myself, I wanted more about writing. A biography entitled A Storyteller’s Life should have more about the craft of storytelling.

2. There are subtle bits of racism throughout the biography. Yes, of course, the British Raj was heavy on the poison, but what I mean is that Chisholm suffers a bit from the same elitism.

Biography of the Anglo-Indian writer who I first discovered when I read In This House of Brede in high school. I've enjoyed her other novels, some about nuns as well as those about India. Her father was a businessman prior to independence and because of World War I she and her sisters stayed with their parents instead of being sent "home" to England for their education, and they all grew up with a deep love for India. She always knew her destiny was to be a writer, and worked at her craft till the end of her long life. It's not a thrilling story, but interesting to watch as she develops her skills and see how she shapes her experiences into stories.

It's a great biography of this author. Very engaging, it reads almost like a novel itself.

Excellent biography. A very interesting life of course but also just about the right amount of detail and relevant but limited commentary.

Wonderful insight into this wonderful author who always surprises me - I recently discovered her children's books -The Doll's House, The Story of Holly and Ivy, which makes me cry, and each time I read, or re-read, I see something new.

I love classic movies and one of my favourites is "Black Narcissus" which i have seen many times. Rumer Godden is the author who wrote the book that film is based on although as i discovered reading this book she never liked the movie that much.
This is a well written and engaging biography starting during the author's childhood in British India through various trials of life until she find her vocation and calling as a writer and begins to make a success of it.
Her later conversion to Catholicism and the various ups and downs of her career and personal life are all well covered.
A good read if you're interested in her work.

3.75. I have been a long term fan of Rumer Godden and attribute her writing in part to my long held fascination with India. Although I’ve read her autobiography, it was interesting to read this author’s detailed description of her life. She knew her personally and traveled with her later in life, so the insights were compelling. What a life!

I love Godden's novels and remember the enjoyment I had from her children's stories as a child. Sadly I've not yet been able to locate any of her children's books except the Mousewife, but I am still in hopes of doing so. I knew nothing about Godden except that she'd grown up in India and wrote wonderful stories. I found this fascinating and informative. There's just something about knowing about the mind behind the stories that I enjoy. For some reason it makes me enjoy the work even more.

As an introduction to the life of Rumer Godden, this book is a useful starting point. However, I now find myself wanting to read a fuller biography of her life, though I'm not aware that one exists as yet? This implies that Rumer Godden is a writer that we are not sufficiently cherishing and that her work deserves more attention than it is receiving. From the books of hers that I have read so far I have the impression that we should be cherishing her.

Alex Tickell puts it this way:
'Rumer Godden was one of the most prolific writers of late colonial India but while her fiction, particularly her writing for children, reached a mass market, she has remained marginal to canonical literary history'
Tickell, Alex (2020). Postcolonial Fiction and the Question of Influence: Arundhati Roy, The
God of Small Things and Rumer Godden. Postcolonial Text, 15(1)
https://oro.open.ac.uk/69606/
(I very much like this article and can recommend)

I am putting Godden's autobiography 'A Time To Dance, No Time To Weep' on my 'want to read' list!

Note though that if you are interested in the filming of 'The River', there is a whole chapter on this in Chisholm's biography.