Gentian Hill [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Goudge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2011

Written by the author of "Island Magic" and "Green Dolphin Country", which won a special prize from Louis B.Mayer of MGM as well as a Literary Guild Award, this is another romantic novel.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge was born on April 24th 1900 in Wells, Somerset, where her father was Principal of Wells Theological College. Although she had privately intended writing as a career, her parents insisted she taught handicrafts in Oxford. She began writing in her spare time and her first novel ISLAND MAGIC, set in Guernsey, was a great success here and in America. GREEN DOLPHIN COUNTRY (1944) projected her to fame, netting a Literary Guild Award and a special prize of GBP30,000 from Louis B. Mayer of MGM before being filmed. In her later years Elizabeth Goudge settled in Henley-on-Thames. She died on April 1st, 1984.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 317 pages
• Publisher: Amereon Ltd (June 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0848822838
• ISBN-13: 978-0848822835
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,594,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece!, August 11, 2000

By 

Kathy Carroll (Monmouth, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gentian Hill (Hardcover)

Elizabeth Goudge is my favorite author. In this book she combines history and all the many types of love ( love for God, selfless love, romance, etc.) to make a book that I just hated to leave! It takes place in Cornwall, but also takes us to France, to see the devastation in the wake of the French Revolution from the eyes of two people. I felt like I was there!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Favorite book from my teen years, May 11, 2011

By 

kwillspen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gentian Hill (Hardcover)

Thirty years after reading this book when I was 18, the scenes between Zachary and Stella are still with me. I've carried a tattered copy with me for those thirty years through dozens of moves and nearly lost it when a puppy got hold of it and ripped the cover off, but the book is timeless for lovers of teenage romance and historical fiction. This book made far more sense to me than "A Tale of Two Cities," and I'll never understand why it didn't become a classic. It is, by far, the best story I ever read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Goudge in the Time of Nelson and Napoleon, November 30, 2011

By 

John Gough "John Gough - Deakin University" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gentian Hill (Hardcover)

Goudge in the Time of Nelson and Napoleon

In a Note at the start of "Gentian Hill", Elizabeth Goudge explains that this novel is a retelling of the legend of St Michael's Chapel at Torquay, on the south-west coast of England. The chapel was a place of pilgrimage for any Roman Catholic sailors whose boats anchored in Torbay. She briefly names a village, and a nearby hill which are used, with fictional names, as key locations in the novel. From shreds of place, history, and legend, Goudge creates a vast tapestry of character, events, and epic, romantic themes.

A young Catholic English aristocrat, Anthony, orphaned by the guillotines of the French Revolution, raised too delicately by a doting grandmother, sent to be a midshipman in the Royal Navy, deserts his ship, and takes on a new identity, Zachary, near Gentian Hill.

A younger girl, Stella, orphaned by a ship-board explosion at Plymouth, and raised by a country farming couple, wears a locket, with a handwritten Shakespearean quote.

Boy meets girl. Things are not what they seem. There are dark forces haunting them, and mid-way through the story, the boy is revealed to be a deserter. He returns to the Navy, and eventually fights at the Battle of Trafalgar. Stella has a second-sense, and in a vision is present with Anthony-Zachary during the battle.

Much else happens. There is a local kind-hearted doctor, a parish Anglican priest, a Catholic Abbe, with a dark sorrow of his own.

All of these rich threads weave steadily together: the teenage love matures into adult marriage, and the revelations of lost identities and connections. As is so often the case with Goudge's novels, the astute reader can guess what will happen. The interests is not in the surprises of the story, but in the way the expected happy endings are eventually reached, and paid for.

Her writing is unique, even though it resembles, at times, Thomas Hardy's rural peasantry, C.S. Forester's Nelsonic "Hornblower", Jane Austen's narratives of class and courtship, with her own addition of myth-like legend, the fairy-haunted countryside, and a deep sensitivity to nature, as a focus for life, and a solace for death.

John Gough -- Deakin University -- [e-mail]