Rumer Godden

by Lucy Le-Guilcher (Editor), Phyllis B. Lassner (Editor)

From 1929 to 1997, Rumer Godden published more than 60 books, including novels, biographies, children's books, and poetry; this is the first collection devoted to this important transnational writer. Focusing on Godden's writing from the 1930s onward, the contributors uncover the breadth and variety of the literary landscape on display in works such as Black Narcissus, The Lady and the Unicorn, A Fugue in Time, and The River. Often drawing on her own experiences living in India and Britain, Godden establishes a diverse narrative topography that allows her to engage with issues related to her own uncertain position as an author representing such nomadic Others as gypsies, or taking up the displacements brought about by international conflict. Recognizing that studies of the transnational must consider the condition of enforced and elected exile within the changing political and cultural borders of postcolonial nations, the contributors position Godden with respect to different and overlapping fields of modern literary history; colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies; inter-media studies; and children's literature. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the richness and variety of Godden's writing and render the myriad ways in which Godden is an important critical presence in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

212 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 2010

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

Apparently a scholarly literary biography of Rumer Godden does not exist, since all of the writers in this collection refer to the Anne Chisholm biography and Godden’s autobiographical writings for information about her life and work. In the introduction, Lucy Le-Guilcher and Phyllis Lassner establish their intention to generate academic interest in Godden’s work, often dismissed as middlebrow. For them and for many of the writers in the collection, Godden’s novels are interesting because they are not easy to classify: not always clearly for adults or for children, modernist or realist. Victoria Stewart’s chapter on A Fugue in Time and Lassner’s on China Court emphasize Godden’s contribution to the development of the English novel, successfully combining modernist and realist techniques. Other essays touch on film adaptations, writings about India, and books specifically for children, and the last chapters include personal reminiscences, so there is much here for anyone with an interest in this author.