Towers in the Mist

By -
Towers in the Mist, by Elizabeth Goudge

This was our readalong title for Elizabeth Goudge Day, and I'd been saving it for a whole year.  It is one of the "Cathedral City" trilogy and set in Elizabethan Oxford, the others being The Dean's Watch (Victorian Ely) and City of Bells (Edwardian Wells).   And boy, does she have a good time with the Elizabethan setting!

This is a family story, so we get to know all of the Leighs: the Canon of Christ Church, his many children, and the elderly and imperious Great-Aunt Susan.  But we start first with a young scholar, Faithful, who has walked to Oxford in the hope of getting an education despite his penury and is sort of adopted by Canon Leigh.  Mostly we follow Joyeuce, the eldest daughter, who has been burdened with the housekeeping since her mother died four years ago.  She finds it extremely difficult, and then a wealthy but perhaps unsuitable scholar, Nicolas, wants her to sneak out to see him.

The house is almost as much a character as the rest of the family, and apparently it was Goudge's actual home while her father worked at Oxford.  She seems to have populated her lonely house with plenty of company!  She also entertains herself by describing daily life and sprinkling famous characters throughout; Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh are both there as teenagers, and the whole thing works up to a grand visit by the Queen.  And it's all done in a sense of fun; there are jokes and humorous asides all throughout the story that lighten the serious and even tragic events.  I think this might be the story where Goudge allows herself to have the most fun in an adult novel.

I really enjoyed this one and look forward to reading it again.  Of course, all the descriptions of embroidery and tapestry work might have helped with my impression.  But it really was a delightful read all 'round.

Comments

  1. LoryMay 24, 2018 at 5:52 AM

    I read this one last year and it was a lot of fun, if a bit unwieldy at times in its wanting to stuff in so many incidents and characters. I'm so glad you enjoyed it too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joy Weese MollMay 31, 2018 at 3:48 PM

    I would love that setting! I'm putting The Dean's Watch on my Goodreads list so that I can start from the beginning.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more