Retro Reads discussion

This thread is for open spoilers & final conclusions, so enter at your own risk! :D

Okay, I take it all back about the “immature” claim I made in the other thread! I just finished and Goudge really pulled it off. The connection between Henrietta and Ferranti was maybe just a skosh tidy, but the patterns and themes in the story were as gorgeous as the prose in the end.

As a portrait of acute depression it is insightful and moving, and linking depression with the parable of the Prodigal Son was a connection I had never before made.

I also loved Henrietta’s visions, so appropriate to a child and yet holding promise of talents to come. And the echoes of her father in sentences like “The sight of perfection was like a gate that let one out into freedom.”

Even in moments that are relatively tangential to the main thrust of the story, Goudge pauses over and over to tell us something wonderful in just the right words. Like that moment in the theater, where “the things that in broad daylight are shadowy and dim became in that enchanted cavern where they sat the things that mattered.” I’ve never seen the glamour of theater so neatly summed up.

I quite loved the character of Felicity, symbolic though she may have been on certain levels. The name she was given implied a symbolic role but I feel she took over the telling of her own story and became human despite whatever Goudge might have intended. She had such a strong inner compass and very little fuss about her.

Jocelyn didn’t quite gel for me, as obsessed as he became with Ferranti. Not sure the everyday reality of Ferranti over time will really live up to the person in his mind. At least Jocelyn achieved felicity in the end, har har.

I’ve been rereading Margery Allingham novels in another group and she too has some divine-fool clergymen who are as charming and wise as Grandfather. They possess a strain of magical wisdom that resonates for me.

My review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Your review hit all my Goudge buttons, Abigail!

Thanks, Karlyne! I do love her work.

Abigail wrote: "Thanks, Karlyne! I do love her work."

There are very few authors I'd love to meet, not so I could talk their ears off, but just so I could sit at their feet and listen to their conversations. She's one of them.

For sure!

Great review!

Thanks, Veronique!