Beyond the Snow

Elizabeth Goudge had an extraordinarily long and successful career as a writer of novels, children’s books, and hagiography. Although it is now forty years since The Joy of the Snow was published, she still has thousands of fans worldwide who love the mixture of honesty, fiction, and faith that they discover in her work. Throughout her career she was generally praised as a writer of charming novels; at times criticized too for the happy endings of her ‘escapist’ fiction. But at the same time, because she drew on her own life as material for her books, there is a strong seam of reality in them, in which her readers are able to recognize their own life experience and problems, and to find real help and inspiration.

What she did so well – and supremely in her 1960 novel, The Dean’s Watch – was to weave an almost fairytale thread through the dark reality of human struggle and weakness, and then to lift the whole novel on to a spiritual plane. In fact her bestsellers, that book-shops file under Women’s Romantic Fiction, actually progressed into ever-deeper discussion of the Christian faith which was at the heart of her life, and all her work.

The happy endings were deliberate – she wanted to give her readers books filled with light and joy – and yet she also shared with them her personal experiences of loss, depression and nervous breakdown. These coloured her own view of the Christian journey, so that towards the end of her life she described the soul as

a little animal, like a mole, scrabbling with his forepaws to make an upward tunnel, kicking out with his hind-legs at the adversary who tries ceaselessly to drag him back and down. Often he is dragged down, but he recovers himself and goes on and with each fresh beginning he is a little higher up; and always the pull of the sun is far more powerful than that of the adversary.

The Joy of the Snow, her autobiographical book of happy memories, acknowledges but in the main does not dwell upon these experiences of being dragged back and down, for not only did she consider herself to be ridiculously fortunate and even ‘spoilt,’ but a determined optimism and thankfulness was a central part of her Christian belief. Her clergyman father said in one of his sermons:

There is a sense in which every Christian must be an optimist. In the very darkest days he can maintain his cheerfulness, because he believes in God and in a great purpose of love which will ultimately be fulfilled.

For most of us, this is much easier said than done in life’s “very darkest days.” But however difficult it might be, a vital part of the soul’s journey as she saw it was to counter the adversary by focusing upon the light above; always struggling to accomplish what Robert Louis Stevenson called his great task of happiness. Happiness is therefore central to all her work, even that undertaken at periods of great difficulty in her life. Although the darkness might then, for a while, hold her back:

when…the sun showed signs of coming out again I would write as hard as I could, determined that I would write books and that they should be happy ones.

No doubt it was for this same reason that she left no very detailed account of her dark times in The Joy of the Snow. There are only those happy novels . . . which also deal with loneliness, war, childlessness, mental illness, and breakdown. Her own winter experiences.

A question authors are often asked, she says, is “Do we put ourselves in our books?”

Speaking for myself I do not put the woman I am into them but after I had been writing for years I noticed the regular appearance in story after story of a tall graceful woman, well-balanced, intelligent, calm, capable and tactful. She is never flustered, forgetful, frightened, irritable or nervy. She does not drop bricks, say the opposite of what she means, let saucepans boil over or smash her best teapot. She is all I long to be and all I never will be. She is in complete reverse a portrait of myself.

There appears also, in story after story, at least one character – male or female – who is broken in some way; struggling and suffering but nevertheless trying hard to live their Christian faith; often failing and in their own eyes ineffectual, but still soldiering prayerfully on. Like Jean Anderson in The Scent of Water, for whom life is a daily battle. “Many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, [but] there was nothing unreal about her courage” because she had always “done what she had to do and faced what she had to face.”

She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them, but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.

Fiction, of course, can never be assumed to reflect the reality of its author – but as Parson Hawthyn says on receiving the gift of a book in The White Witch: “You give me great wealth, for the gift of a book is the gift of a human soul. Men put their souls in their books.”

The soul in the books of Elizabeth Goudge reached out to readers worldwide and surely made of her, not merely a romantic novelist but one of the great Christian writers of the twentieth century.