Since I decided to join two different reading challenges this year, I'm happy that some of the books I've chosen to read will fit into both challenges because I'm not a very fast reader nor do I have a lot of time for reading my own choices.
Today I finished Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge (who, being born in 1900 just slides in on the Victorian Era so I get to count her in Challenge #1). In Modern Mrs. Darcy's challenge she fits under "three titles by the same author."
What a book!
It takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery as we watch the three main characters on their journeys. It teaches through story of different kinds of love and the depth and validity of all of them. It draws you in to loving/hating each of the characters and seeing that in many ways you're just like them. It's not fast-moving (her books don't seem to be), but it held my attention as I grew to know the characters almost as friends.
This is my third Elizabeth Goudge book, though I read The Little White Horse some years ago as a read-aloud with my kids, and I find her ability to describe characters and their inner beings very eye-opening and discerning, much like Jane Austen but without the sharp, almost snarky wit.
Some of my favorite insightful quotes are:
- ...the nun's apparent coldness was not the result of want of feeling but of iron control clamped down upon too much.
- "I think, now, that you should cease to brood upon your shame," she said. "You have experienced your own nothingness. You know of it for all time. You will not forget...so great is the magnanimity of God that if we come at last to His feet I think He cares little how we came...Divine humility is a strange thing for proud humanity to contemplate..."
- It was her opinion that the compensatory intensification of delight in little things that comes when larger things have been renounced is God-given. Why should He have scattered such playthings as sunbeams and kittens along the thorny way if they were not to be exclaimed over and enjoyed?
- "There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folk like knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get."
- ..."When a humble soul humbles herself, she has not got far to fall, but when a proud soul humbles herself, it's like jumping off the top of a cathedral tower..."
Elizabeth has also given me a desire to go see the Channel Islands, but I don't think that will ever happen. Due to this book I also want to see New Zealand now, which I never had a great interest in before. Oh, the benefits and trials of reading!
I just ordered her autobiography, Joy of the Snow, from the library and hope to get to know her a little better and where she's coming from.
Besides reading this book, I'm also doing the year-long book study of The Gentle Art of Domesticity by Jane Brocket hosted by Jenny. It's been inspiring.
How's your reading going?
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