Customer Reviews

Gentian Hill

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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 -- jagough49@gmail.com

It puzzles me that Green Dolphin Street should have been Goudge's most popular novel, when books like this one sparkle among her works. I have never read anything of Goudge's that I did not like; however, this may well be my favorite of all her work (I am torn between this one and The Dean's Watch).

Goudge does a superb job of showing how suffering can positively transform a life and, through the grace of God, inform the work for which that life was, perhaps, intended. This book does all of that; and it condenses the themes of Grace, Mercy, and Redemption into a single note - or gem, shining brightly in the mind long after the reading is finished.