Rumer Godden: A Storyteller’s Life

A biography of Rumer Godden. Born in India, at the height of British colonial power, she lived there until the 1950s. Her career as a novelist began with “Black Narcissus”, which became a bestseller on publication in 1939 – and like many of her novels – was adapted into a film. Her relationship with India, although passionate, was ultimately and perhaps inevitably ambivalent and this ambivalence came to a head in an incident when she and her children were living in Kashmir. A servant tried to poison them and the notoriety surrounding the case forced Godden to leave Kashmir and eventually India itself. Her move from India to Scotland contains parallel themes and adventures akin to themes within her novels.

Kirkus Reviews:
The first half of Rumer Godden’s 90 years were spent in India and many of her books are based on her experiences there. They have been likened to Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown for the light they throw on the last years of the Raj. She was no conventional English rose and shocked society by starting her own dancing school in Calcutta, accepting European pupils and later, leaving her feckless husband to live alone with his two daughters in the hills. Her novel The River, made into a film by Jean Renoir, mirrors her idyllic childhood. Black Narcissus, which made her famous, shows English nuns near Darjeeling struggling, as she did, to understand intractable Indian traditions and King Fishers Catch Fire is the story of a horrific event in her own life when a Kashmiri cook put ground glass into the family’s food. This event drove her home to England where she divorced and later became a Catholic (the background to The House of Brede). Basing her biography on talks with Godden, letters and interviews, Anne Chisholm has given us a book that is as compulsively readable as the work of her complex and vivid subject. (Kirkus UK)

Although Godden spent much of her life in exotic climes and has proven to be one of the few truly successful “crossover” writers, this sprawling biography will neither draw nor hold the attention of readers. Chisholm pads a narrative already filled with eye-glazing details of decades of comings and goings, minor meetings, and social events by taking side excursions to describe the making of films and other tangential episodes; she pays scant attention to Godden’s children’s books, and never considers how or why the author wrote for that audience. Published in England in 1998, this doesn’t cover Godden’s last months (she died near the end of the year). It’s a mountain of undigested information, richer in itinerary than insight. (Kirkus Reviews)