Any lover of Elizabeth Goudge will pretty much know what to expect from her autobiography, and indeed it is a gentle, beautiful book. But it is always a mistake with EG to take her joy in life or her serious attention to the small concerns of children as mere whimsey. She saw the beauty of ordinary things with a detail that most of us miss, and that attention to detail also meant that she could see and analyse the human heart pretty accurately. Her love for her father comes through very clearly, but also that he was a demanding man to live with, giving much of his spiritual and material wealth to others, often to the cost of his family. Her recollections of her mother's grief at leaving Wells, and of her lifelong physical suffering are painful to read.
EG has a small but determined following and it is well-deserved. She can seem sentimental to the modern mind (and some of her books do cross the line from insight into mushiness) because her unashamed Christianity is of that unfashionable self-sacrificial kind that can very easily be mistaken for weakness. In fact her best heroines are anything but weak, they identify and defeat their character flaws with courage and at personal cost. They display an understanding of the truth that we are able to change only ourselves.
The insights EG displays in her fiction she learned from her life. She describes her self as spoilt child, who grew into a poorly-educated woman who was always dependent on others for the practical things of life. She lived a quiet, secluded life, caring for her mother after her father's death, content to stay at home. But what marks her out, what brought her to popular attention and bestseller status, is her ability to make even the most outwardly ordinary life significant. She wrote about the inner life, and she makes us understand that what seems insignificant to the world is of great and ultimate significance, because God sees it and understands. ( )

A charming autobiography by a wonderful writer, full of that particularly Edwardian combination of practicality and wonder for both the magical and the natural world. Goudge is an unabashedly Christian writer and it is, perhaps because of her gentle-yet-firm faith, a great pleasure to also read of her respect for such things as fairies, white witches and events-out-of-time. She is precisely the sort of person I'd love to spend a great number of evenings with, sitting by the fire, sipping tea, and swapping tales. Enjoy. And then go our and read her fiction. It's a terrible shame much of it is out of print. ( )

loved this. she made such a beautiful picture of her life and different english countrysides. ( )