Christine Rawlins > Quotes

“Why do you call the people who don’t live in the Close the Lower Orders?” asked Hugh Anthony. “Grandfather calls them God’s Poor.” “Eh?” said the Dean, a little startled, and then he adjusted his eyeglass and rubbed his nose in a puzzled sort of way, as though he did not quite know how to answer. “I suppose,” said Hugh Anthony, “that Saint Hugh of Torminster belonged to the Lower Orders?” “Certainly not,” said the Dean indignantly. “The Blessed Saint Hugh was Abbot of Torminster. I hold – I say it in all humility – a position very like his own.” “Before he was Abbot of Torminster, he kept pigs,” said Hugh Anthony. “Like Mr. Burton, our butcher.” “Merely legendary pigs,” said the Dean. “And the Apostles were fishmongers,” continued the awful child, “like Mr. Robson in the Market Place… It’s a pity, isn’t it, that all the saints seem to belong to the Lower Orders?”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“Torminster in A City of Bells is Wells. If the houses in the Close, hidden behind their high walls, could be seen with the eyes of imagination as fortresses, the Palace was one in actual fact. Grey, battlemented walls, with loopholes for arrows, surrounded it and its gardens, completely hiding them from sight, and a wide moat, brimful of water, surrounded the walls. The portcullis was still there, and the drawbridge that linked this warlike island to the peace of Torminster. As they stood watching, the swans obligingly rounded the curve of the moat and sailed royally towards the drawbridge… The foremost swan…pulled with his beak the bell-rope that hung from the Palace wall. He rang it once, imperiously…and instantly a human menial showered bread from a window. This ringing of the bell was the superb accomplishment of the swans of Torminster, an accomplishment that had made them world-famous.36 Small wonder that Elizabeth said, linking her own childhood experience with that of Robert Louis Stevenson: Looking back from such a different world, through such a length of time, it seems that the sheltered happy childhoods of Victorian and Edwardian days had a very special magic.37”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“Naturally, her situation as an only child meant that there were times in her early years when she was lonely. Worse than this, however, in Elizabeth’s own harsh opinion of herself, was that her role as the only child of an invalid mother turned her into “a neurotic selfish little beast.”80 In my early years no one expected that my mother would live long. She herself was quite sure she would not, and like so many sensitive extroverts her own suffering caused her not only to be acutely aware of illness in others but even to imagine it was there when it was not. She considered me a delicate child who might not live long either… (Like Isaac in The Dean’s Watch perhaps, who “had always been a delicate and abnormally sensitive child, prone as the delicate are to seek a little comfort for himself here and there, and dangerously indulged by his equally delicate mother.”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“When she came to write her novels about Wells, however, it was Tower House that she used as their setting; all except for the bedrooms at the Principal’s House, which she remembered “were decorated with carved cherubs of stone or wood.” When I wrote A City of Bells I placed my family in Tower House but fetched the cherub population from across the road to be with them.23 A City of Bells was published in April 1936.”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“Poor Elizabeth always had this ailing mother on the couch… She couldn’t bear the thought of her mother suffering all the time and I suppose she must have said something to one of the maids, and the maid said, “Well of course it was your fault for being born.” And she carried that guilt all her life. But it goes back to the bicycle incident. She added, So there were to be no more children and that was the end of married life for Canon Goudge – he was a saint.”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“In contrast, she had fond memories of time spent in her grandfather’s study. I made a point of standing at his elbow when he was working and if I drove him distracted his serene selflessness let no signs of irritation appear. In memory his little study is full of sunshine, with the scent of the passion flowers rioting over the balcony outside coming in through the open window. It would not even have occurred to me to stand at my father’s elbow while he worked; I doubt if he would have tolerated me there. The difference between the two men was that my father did not love children as children, though he did his duty by them when related to him with admirable patience, while my grandfather loved all children, clean or dirty, good or bad, with equal devotion. When he became aware of me he would patiently put down his pen and smile.61”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“...there is a constant theme at the centre of all her writings which forms the heart of her vision of God, From her earliest novel to the mature vision of her autobiography, the central importance of unity, reconciliation, one-ness, is reiterated; for she came increasingly to see everything in life, even the darkness of fear and pain and suffering, as part of the one perfect whole that is Creation, that tiny hazelnut of Dame Julian's vision that was all that is made.”
― Christine Rawlins, A Vision of God

“...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.”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge

“Hers was indeed an unusual childhood, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the fictional Barsetshire world of Anthony Trollope; for during the first eleven years of her life the canons, bishops and deans of Wells were her family’s near neighbours. In fact she shared a birthday with Trollope, who was born eighty-five years earlier on 24th April 1815; and like him, she was to create many delightful and memorable clergymen in her novels.”
― Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge