" 'I had an idea that if you read the books they write for their children, you will know something about the soul of a people that you could not know otherwise. Folk music teaches you a great deal, too, and the little pictures a peasant paints on the walls of his house to beautify it are of more value as evidence than pictures in the art galleries. I wanted, you see, to understand the soul of the people to whom I – for whom I worked.'"
"She loved beauty and she was creative, but her creativeness found its joy in the shaping of everyday life to a form of comeliness, so that it became not just something that one just put up with, but something that was enjoyable and lovely in itself."
"Hilary in his old age was getting rather irritatingly full of quotations from queer old writers one had never heard of, yet they came in handy sometimes, for there was no doubt about it that the longer ago people lived the better sense they seemed to talk."
~Elizabeth Goudge, The Heart of the Family
I've been sort of binge-reading Elizabeth Goudge this summer, particularly her three book series about the Eliot family: The Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim's Inn, and The Heart of the Family. She is a new-to-me author who was suggested to me when asking for some lighter-but-not twaddly summer reading over on the AO Forum. She is now among my favorites. Her novels aren't action-packed – I'd describe them as more character-driven – but the writing and the themes are beautiful, and you feel that you truly come to know the characters, in this case the various members of the Eliot family. Thankfully, she has written lots of other books as well. I know what I will be reaching for next time I'm in the mood for something not-too-difficult yet still beautiful and thought-provoking.
My Bookbag This Week:
Devotional: Job with a commentary: Job: The Wisdom of the Cross (Ash)
Theological or Christian Living: Spiritual Depression (Lloyd-Jones), With (Jethani)
AO Book Discussion Group: On Break for the Summer
On Education: Between Books
Topic of Special Interest: Between Books (Hmm, I'm noticing a theme here)
Novel/Biography/Memoir: Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons)
Read-Alouds with the Children: The Wheel on the School (De Jong), Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan)
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You and I are both talking about Goudge today. :)
ReplyDeleteYes I saw that. :) I think my last WWW post was Goudge too. My new favorite.....
DeleteI love that you girls are writing about the same author, and in your first quote, Jen, the same theme. Wonderful.
ReplyDeleteThe ideas of renewing and understanding culture through children is beautiful!
The word comeliness isn't used nearly enough anymore.