One of my favourite books in the world is The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, written in 1946 and set in a magical version of Devon. I dearly wish I'd known it when I was young, for Goudge's brand of magic (gentle, wind-swept and rain-kissed) would have perfectly suited the child I was. Instead I read it three years ago, fell entirely under its spell, and then spent a whole winter devouring all of her other books for both kids and adults. (I was sick in bed for some of those months, and Goudge was the perfect companion.)

In an excellent essay on Goudge, Kari Sperring writes: 

"With the exception of her children’s books, most of her work is not what most people would think of as fantasy. The children’s books are all set in a version of our real world, too, though her towns and landscapes in them are imaginary. Yet in all her work the boundaries between worlds are thin. Folklore and poetry, transcendent experience, and glimpses of the immanent pervade them, and her characters -- especially the youngest and the oldest -- slip between these worlds easily. Her characters channel folktales and legend through their lives and their connections with others.

"This is most clear in her children’s books, in particular, her three best known -- The Little White Horse, Henrietta’s House, and Linnets and Valerians (recently retitled The Runaways). In TLWH, which is the most directly fantastical of Goudge’s books, the protagonist Maria must explore the history of her family and their ancestral home via a blend of fact and magic -- the injustices done by her forefather Sir Hrolf were real enough, but their context and consequences belong as much to the realm of magic and the liminal as to reality. A white horse and a giant dog come and go throughout the history of her family -- and her own experience -- guiding, observing, and sometimes leading Maria to the discoveries she needs to make. The dog -- another Hrolf -- is real enough but seemingly immortal, but the horse is a unicorn and a creature of the sea and not to be grasped or owned. The story sounds soppy, and the recent film (titled The Secret of Moonacre) tried hard to make it soppy by replacing the very real magic of Goudge’s writing with sentiment and gloss, but in the book, it is not. Rather, everything is tied together by extra-mundane bonds, so that Maria’s friend and ally, Robin, is at first a boy in dreams who becomes real, and the white horse brings not only Maria but the book’s main antagonist to a solution to the ancient problem they face that is partly realistic, yes, but rooted in liminal experience."

Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge was born in 1900 in the cathedral city of Wells, where her father was a clergyman and theological scholar. His career took the family to Ely and Oxford (two cities she loved and would later write about) -- but his early death meant the loss of their Oxford home and sudden impecunity. Reeling from the loss, Elizabeth's semi-invalid mother announced they would take a month's holiday in Devon. Her elderly Nanny, now a permanent part of the family, was to come along too. In her autobiography, Elizabeth writes:

"Devon? Why Devon? We knew no one there and where could we stay? But my mother had seen an advertisement in the paper. A small wooden bungalow could be cheaply rented for a summer holiday at a village called Marldon, and she was quite certain that was where we must go. So Nanny and I dragged ourselves out of the ooze of our exhaustion and we set off, driven by a friend who had a large comfortable car and said he knew the way. More or less he did and very late in the afternoon we found the wooden bungalow and inside it our unknown landlady, who kept a guest-house next door, had lit a glowing fire.

"For it was what those who do not love Devon call 'a typical Devon day'; that is to say it was raining, that steady relentless rain that lifted the Ark about the primeval flood, and at the same time, since the day was windless, a thick mist covered the earth. We could know nothing of our surroundings except that the bungalow seemed poised upon the summit of a hill and that its wooden walls did not look very weather-proof.

"It was felt that food would be reassuring and Nanny and I began quickly getting some sort of meal together, but the friend who had brought us down took me away from the preparations for a few moments to the western-facing window. 'Look,' he said, 'what do you think is out there?' The downpour was slackening at last and no longer drummed on the roof. A small wet green lawn sloped from the window and appeared to fall into the mist as though it was green water sliding over the edge of a precipice. We could see nothing through the mist yet we were aware that behind it was the westering sun, and also it seemed to fill a deep valley and rising beyond the valley was -- what? 'Something grand,' said our friend. 'You'll know in the morning.' A tremor went through me, and I think through him too, for we seemed to be sharing one of those inexplicable moments of expectation and intimation that come sometimes when a small earthly mystery seems to be speaking of a mystery beyond itself.

"I was woken the next morning by a sound I had not heard for a long time, a cock crowing in the garden, across the lane, eastward where the sun would soon be rising. Had the mist lifted? When later I pulled the curtains it was still there, but the morning sun was shining through it and turning it to gold, and every bush and tree that lined the lane was glistening with diamond drops.

"It was what lovers of Devon call 'a typical Devon day,' that is to say, a morning of clear shining after rain. Because of the slope of the land the hill seemed higher than it actually was; it seemed high as Ararat, with the wooden bungalow perched like the Ark on its summit. The valley below was even wider and deeper than I had realized the night before and it seemed to hold every beauty that a pastoral Devon valley knows, woods and farms and orchards, green slopes where sheep were grazing, fields of black and white cows, and where there were fields of tilled earth it was the crimson of the earth of South Devon and looked like a field of flowers. And along the eastern horizon lay the range of blue hills called Dartmoor.

"I felt I had come home. I have never felt so deeply rooted anywhere as I was in the earth of Devon. Or rather I did not so much put roots down as find roots that were already there. And yet I had not been born in Devon, I had been born over the border in Somerset. I could not understand it then and I do not understand it now. The only tremor was the realization that in a few weeks time we should have to leave this earthly paradise."

But in fact, they did not leave. World War II began and the family stayed in Marldon -- where Elizabeth lived for the next twelve years. She wrote some of her best books there, paying the bills with the steady work of her pen. A deep love of Devon shines through every single page of The Little White Horse...as well as through Linnets and Valerians, and her quietly beautiful adult novel The Rosemary Tree.

The village of Marldon is not far away from us, just on the other side of the moor, so I wanted to go see those hills for myself -- especially since learning that Moonacre Manor, the enchanted setting of The Little White Horse, was inspired by Compton Castle: an old manor house in Marldon parish. South Devon has changed since Elizabeth's day; it's now less remote, more heavily populated, but still full of orchards, woodlands, and farms, and Marldon itself has retained its old charm. I wanted to see the lanes she once walked, the bungalow where she lived, and her old village church. I especially wanted to see Compton Castle, now a National Trust property.

I finally made the journey last year at this time, as autumn colored the hedgerows and fields, in the company of four other writers who also love Goudge: Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Liz Williams and Veronica Williams. We started with lunch at Marldon's Church House Inn, where Ellen read us some relevant passages from Goudge's autobiography...

...and then made our way through the winding lanes to the gates of "Moonacre Manor."

Comptom Castle, a fortified manor house, was the seat of Sir Maurice de la Pole during the reign of King Henry II. It passed into the de Compton family, and then, through marriage, to the Gilbert family. The house was enlarged in the mid-14th century, fortified in 1520, and then sold in 1785 -- after which, in the 18th and 19th centuries, it fell into ruin. A descendant of the Gilbert family bought the property in 1931, began the castle's restoration, and then gave it to the National Trust -- on condition that the family would continue to occupy the house, which they do to this day.

Compton Castle is considerably smaller than Moonacre Manor in The Little White Horse -- but the soaring main hall, the kitchen gardens, the orchard full of vivid red apples and the emerald-green hills full of fleecy white sheep, all hold the magic she drew upon to create her timeless story.

We were thrilled to discover a kitchen well just like the one at Moonacre Manor. Sitting beside it, I could almost believe that Goudge's story was real after all, and Serena the hare would come tumbling over the grass, followed by the noble dog Hrolf.

(Her talent for creating distinctive animal characters was second to none.)

In a recent essay for Slightly Foxed, Victoria Neuman has this to say about Goudge and her work:

"Whether she is describing a young child climbing over slippery rock steps from a sea cave or uncovering the glories of a tangled garden in Devon, she is one of the only modern prose writers to capture the spirit of the 17th-century mystic Thomas Traherne:

"'The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which should never be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things...'

"Like Trahern Goudge was an ardent Anglican. But although religion can be an oppressive presence in her adult novels, in her children's books it manifests itself merely as a sense of embracing safety. One of her obituaries quoted Jane Austen's famous line from Mansfield Park, 'Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.' Her fictional world is devoid of malice...Loyalty, kindness, affection, the wonder of nature, the smells of good, plain English cooking, a hot bath and clean clothes, the appealing personalities of pets: these are the things she celebrates. In Goudge's children's books, to use Louise MacNeice's phrase, there is 'sunlight on the garden' and the equation always comes out."

I should note that unlike Neuman I don't feel oppressed by the Anglican threads within Goudge's work. As the daughter of a clergyman, she was writing about the world she knew best. I enter it as I do any other unknown culture, trusting the writer as my guide, and her generous, mystical, nature-based version of Christianity allows even a wooly old pagan like me to feel welcome within her tales. Goudge, as Kari Sperring writes, "never preaches, nor lays out moral parameters, and, to paraphrase Louisa Alcott, she does not reward the 'good' with gilded treats and the 'bad' with dire punishments. Indeed, I’m not sure she deals in good and bad at all: she writes rather about compassion and understanding and resolution through empathy. Her work is not showy and it is not melodramatic. It is, however, often surprising and sometimes startling. And she rarely if ever does what the reader expects."

"As the world becomes increasingly ugly, callous, and materialistic," Goudge once wrote, "it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that makes an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself."

That statement sums up why I love Elizabeth Goudge, and why I continue to read and re-read her. She, too, believes beauty is vital in a troubled world, and the promise of hope. Her work is old-fashioned, quiet, and slow. I say this without apology, for these qualities have genuine literary value in an our loud, aggressive, and fast-paced culture.

If you'd like to read more about Goudge's life in Devon, here are two previous posts on the subject: A Sense of Otherness and The Magic of Moor and Hill. To learn more about Compton Castle, go here. (You can even stay overnight at the castle, in its charming Watch Tower.) To learn more about the author's life and work, visit the Elizabeth Goudge Society. Or better still, go read her marvelous books if you haven't already.

Words: The text quoted above is from "Elizabeth Goudge: Glimsping the Liminal" by Kari Sperring (Strange Horizons, February 22, 2016), The Joy of Snow: An Autobiography by Elizabeth Goudge (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), and "In Search of Unicorns" by Victoria Neumark (Slightly Foxed, Winter 2018), all of which I recommend. A good biography of Goudge has yet to be published.

Pictures: Marldon and Compton Castle,  South Devon, with thanks to my lovely companions on the journey. The photos are identified in the picture captions. (Run your cursor over the images to see them.)

In her charming little book Three Houses, novelist Angela Thirkell looks back on the houses of her late-Victorian childhood -- including The Grange, an 18th century house in North End Lane in West Kensington, London, the home of Angela's grandparents: Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgie.

"On Sunday my grandparents kept open house," Angela remembers. "Two or three extra places were laid at lunch for any friends who might drop in, but whoever came, I sat next to my grandfather. I was allowed to blow into the froth of his beer, 'to make a bird's nest,' or to have all the delicious outside from the mashed potatoes when they had been browned in the oven. If, disregarding the truth, I said that at home my toast was always buttered on both sides, my statement was gravely accepted and the toast buttered accordingly. There can have been few granddaughters who were so systematically spoiled as I was and it is a legend that the only serious difference of opinion which ever arose between Gladstone and Burne-Jones was as to which of them spoiled an adored granddaughter more."

After lunch, the children were left to their own pursuits: to explore the house, play games in the garden, or sneak into her grandfather's Garden Studio: a long, white, rough-cast building between the orchard and the road.

"It was a little alarming to us: the red-tiled entrance and steps which led down to the furnace-room where we were never allowed to go and where anything, one felt, might live; the iron grills in the floor to let in the warm air for winter days; the tall narrow slit in the outer wall through which the larger finished pictures were passed. Sometimes those pictures went to exhibitions, but more often straight to the friend or patron (in the very best sense of the word) who had commissioned them and was content to wait for years if need be for the perfect expression of the artist's mind.

"In this studio there was a very high set of steps with a higher and lower platform on which the artist worked at the upper portions of his pictures. I remember sitting on these steps, my head wrapped in a many-colored piece of silk and bound with a coronet, while my grandfather made studies of crown and drapery for one of the mourning queens in the great unfinished picture of Arthur in Avalon which is now in the Tate Gallery.

"Because there is a certain likeness between the little girl who wore the coronet and some of her grandfather's pictures, she has also been asked whether she sat to him. As far as I can remember he never used me for a model except on that one occassion when I wore the crown and veil. Nor in any case could he have drawn me often, as I was not yet eight years old when he died.

"Neither did my mother who was a pure 'Burne-Jones type' sit to him much. The curious thing is -- and it ought to open a fresh field of inquiry into heredity -- that the type which my grandfather evolved for himself was transmitted to some of his descendants. In his earlier pictures there is a reflection of my grandmother in large-eyed women of normal, or almost low stature, as against the excessively long-limbed women of his later style. But the hair of these early women is not hers, it is the hair of Rossetti's women, the masses of thick wavy hair which we knew in 'Aunt Janey,' the beautiful Mrs. William Morris. When I remember her, Aunt Janey's hair was nearly white, but there was still the same masses of it, waving from head to tip. To anyone who knew her, Rossetti's pictures -- with the exception of his later exaggerated types -- were absolutely true. The large deep-set eyes, the full lips, the curved throat, the overshadowing hair were all there. Even in old age she looked like a queen as she moved about the house in long white draperies, her hands in a white muff, crowned by her glorious hair."

Sometimes after Sunday lunch at The Grange, the children were put into a carriage "and taken to other gardens with studios in them, where our parents would talk and pace the paths, and we would play among rose trees and apple trees and the very sooty creeping ivy peculiar to London gardens.

"All through the long afternoons the gardens waited for us. Draycott Lodge, where the Holman Hunts lived; Beavor Lodge and the Richmonds; the Vale, home of the de Morgans -- all bricks and mortar now. Melbury Road, even then only a ghost of its old self where the Princeps used to have their friends in a yet more golden age, and where the Watts still lived. Grove End Road, with Tadema's stories which were so difficult to understand until his own infectious laugh warned you that he had reached the point, the agate window and the brazen stairs. Hampstead, Chelsea, Hammersmith, gardens were waiting for us everywhere and people who made noble pictures and were constant friends."

Although the circle of mythic artists here in Devon isn't quite so illustrious as the one Angela grew up in (Burne-Jones and his friends were, by then, among the most celebrated artists of their time), her words make me wonder what younger generations here in Chagford will remember about their myth-rattled, paint-spattered, faery-haunted parents and grandparents. And if any of them will write about it one day.

If they do, I hope they will be kind.

The passage above is from Three Houses by Angela Thirkell (Oxford University Press, 1931); all rights reserved by the author's estate. The paintings and photographs are identified in the picture captions. (Run your cursor over the images to see them.)

Whenever discussing Pre-Raphaelite house design (as we were yesterday), I'm always reminded of this wry description of Edward Burne-Jones' country place, North End House in Rottingdean, as seen from a child's perspective. The child is his grand-daughter, who grew up to be the novelist Angela Thirkell:

"Curtains and chintzes were all were all of Morris stuffs, a bright pattern of yellow birds and red roses," Angela writes. "The low sofa and oak table were designed by one or another Pre-Raphaelite friend of the house, or made to my grandfather's orders by the village carpenter. As I look back on the furniture of my grandparents' two houses I marvel chiefly at the entire lack of comfort which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood succeeded in creating for itself. It was not, I think, so much that they actively despised comfort, as that the word conveyed absolutely nothing to them whatever. I can truthfully say that neither at North End Road [in London] nor at North End House [in Rottingdean] was there a single chair that invited to repose, and the only piece of comfortable furniture that my grandparents ever possessed was their drawing-room sofa in London, a perfectly ordinary large sofa with good springs, only disguised by Morris chintzes. The sofas at Rottingdean were simply long low tables with a little balustrade round two, or sometimes three sides, made of plain oak, or of some inferior wood painted white. There was a slight concession to human frailty in the addition of rigidly hard squabs covered with chintz or blue linen and when to these my grandmother had added a small bolster apparently made of concrete and two or three thin unyielding cushions, she almost blamed herself for wallowing in undeserved luxury.

"The best sofa in the house was a massive wooden affair painted shiny black. It was too short to lie on and you could only sit on it in an upright position, as if you tried to lean you hit your head against the high back. It was upholstered in yellow-brown velvet of such rich and excellent quality that it stuck to one's clothes, making it impossible to move about, and the unyielding cushions and rigid bolsters took up more room than the unlucky users.

"Each bedroom was provided with an oak washing-stand of massive proportions and a towel-horse conceived on aethetic lines but sadly wanting in stability and far too apt to fall heavily forward on to a small child, smothering it in bath towels. As for Pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in. It is true that the spring mattress was then in embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking-trough after a few weeks' use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber.

"Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the Pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind."

Words: The text above is from Three Houses, a short but delightful memoir by Angela Thirkell (Oxford University Press, 1931); all rights reserved by the author's estate.

Pictures: The Briar Rose design by William Morris, in progress. A photograph of Burne-Jones with his grand-daughter Angela. The classic, simple "Sussex chair" produced by Morris & Co. "Ladies & Animals," a painted sideboard by Burne-Jones. The front hallway of Red House, an Arts & Crafts building designed by William Morris & Phillip Webb. Topsy (Morris) and Ned (Burne-Jones) on a hand-painted settle in their rooms at Red Lion Square, drawn by satirist Max Beerbohm for his book Rossetti and His Circle (1922).

A few weeks ago I joined two of my oldest friends -- harpist/composer/filmmaker Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and artist Marja Lee Kruÿt -- for a road trip to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the country house of William and Jane Morris, their children...and, for a time, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It wasn't my first visit to the beautiful old place, but I hadn't been back in several years and we wanted to catch the exhibition there on Mary Lobb, the companion (and probable partner) of May Morris, the youngest of the Morris daughters.

There are so many reasons to love Kelmscott: the quiet loveliness of its riverside setting; the timeless atmosphere created by corbels and gables of golden Cotswold stone; the garden of trees, fruits, and flowers which inspired so many Morris designs; and the drama of the lives that unfolded here in the waning years of the 19th century.

The following passage from Jan Marsh's excellent book The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood gives a taste of what those years were like:

"Kelmscott so fitted Morris' character and enthusiasms that the house has ever since been indelibly associated with his name -- and not without reason, since it played a major role in both his life and his vision of a post-industrial and socialist utopia. It is often forgotten that its first purpose was a holiday home for Jane, the girls and Gabriel. [Jane Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had fallen in love at some point in the late 1860s.] Much as Morris liked the house, it was Jane who elected to spend most time there, and who succeeded at the very end of her life in purchasing the property. Whether it was leased with the intention of providing a retreat to share with Gabriel without causing gossip is a nice point that cannot now be resolved; certainly a join tenancy between Morris and Gabriel was the only way she and Gabriel could sleep under the same roof together without scandal."

"Morris gave one explanation in a letter to Faulkner. 'I have been looking about for a house for the wife and kids,' he wrote, describing Kelmscott and adding, 'I am going down there again on Saturday with Rossetti and my wife: Rossetti because he thinks of sharing it with us if the thing seems likely.' Gabriel presented the plan a bit differently. 'Morris and I been had for some little time in search of a place to take jointly in the country,' he told his uncle, 'when this one was discovered in a house-agent's catalogue -- the last place one would have expected to furnish such an out-of-the-world commodity.'

Rossetti moved into Kelmscott Manor in the summer of 1871, followed by Morris, Jane, and their daughters Jenny and May -- Morris staying just long enough to settle his family in, and then departing for an extensive trip through the wilds of Iceland.

"It is hard to believe," writes Marsh, "that the arrangement was not deliberate."

"Divorce," she explains, "was out of the question for Jane, as it was only possible by proving she had committed adultery and that Morris had not condoned her behaviour. There was no such thing as mutual divorce, and the respondent was denied access to the children, on the grounds of moral corruption and ritual punishment; as a divorcee Jane would have lost Jenny and May as well as her reputation as a respectable woman. In addition the scandal would have made remarriage to Gabriel difficult and dangerous, threatening his career and earning power. This is not to say that she considered this option; rather she adopted the best alternative.

 "Her behaviour, and her husband's, puzzled and disturned many of her contemporaries, and later commentators found the arrangement at Kelmscott to be outside the agreed bounds of propriety, but could not, nevertheless, identify anything manifestly improper about it....

"It seems undeniable," Marsh continues, "that Kelmscott was meant as a place where Jane and Gabriel could be together, and that Morris, reluctantly, agreed. Their excitement at the forthcoming holiday is evident in Gabriel's letters during June; among other plans he ordered a complete set of William Scott's novels for Jane to read in the country. As for Morris, the repeated words from Iceland, 'Please dear Janey be happy,' suggest he was well aware of what Kelmscott meant to her."

Kelmscott village, off the beaten track even now, was extremely remote in the 1870s.

"All services and supplies had to be ordered from Lechlade or Farringdon," writes Marsh, "and there was little local transport or through traffic. Installed in her new domain at the end of the first week of July 1871, Jane set about furnishings and improvements. 'I am getting the fireplace set straight in the dining room, the one with the broken mantleshelf,' she wrote to Phillip Webb, back in London, asking him to send six dozen tiles from the firm's workshop in Queen's Square: 'Will they look best of various patterns or all alike? They must be all blue. The mantleshelf is stone I find, so I am making the masons scrape off the former drab paint. The next thing to be thought of is a grate.' "

"Rossetti and Jane spent the summer very pleasantly. A punt was acquired for outings on the river, and a pony-and-trap was considered. In the evenings, there was reading and embroidery. Gabriel wrote some new poems, painted a replica of Beata Beatrix, did chalk drawings of Jenny and May and a picture of Jane called Water Willow, showing the river, the punt, the church, and the manor in the background. It is one of the sweetest, softest, calmest, and least mannered of his paintings of her, quite without the brooding intensity of other studies and subjects, and seems to reflect happy days at Kelmscott.

"In the autumn, Morris returned from Iceland, "bringing with him a pony named Mouse for his daughters to ride. He stayed only a night or two, taking the punt on the river for a day's fishing and prompting Gabriel to a cartoon illustrating these lines:

Enter skald, moored in a punt
And jacks and tenches exeunt."

When winter came, Gabriel and Jane returned to their respective homes in the city, and the house (cold and damp at that time of year) was shut up until spring.

The lovers saw each other (more circumspectly) in London, and made plans for the months ahead -- but their summer idyll was never to be repeated. Gabriel's mental health, always unstable, took a turn for the worst that winter under a combination of pressures: lingering guilt over the death of his wife (she had overdosed on laudanum, either accidently or deliberately); the social tensions caused by his relationship with Jane; a pointed attack on his work by poet and critic Robert Buchanan; and an addiction to chloral, a sedative prone to causing paranoia and hallucinations. Although friends prevented him from contacting Jane during the first bad months of his breakdown (many unfairly blaming her), by September he was back at Kelmscott, and lived there for the next two years.

Jane continued to love Gabriel -- but could no longer spend long periods of time with him, her attempts to nurse him back to health thwarted by chloral at every turn. Morris rarely ventured to Kelmscott himself since Gabriel had become a permanent fixture -- and by 1874 Morris had enough, withdrawing his share of the rent for the house. It wasn't long after that, however, that Gabriel's mental health spiraled down even further, requiring his return to London (where he was looked after by his other long-time model and mistress, Fanny Cornforth).

Now the Morris family took over the manor and the old house began to fulfill Morris' dream: becoming a true country home for Jane and the children, a source of inspiration for his writing and design, and a place where their artist and socialist friends could gather together to work, play, and inspire each other to change the world through art, beauty, craftwork, stories, and education for all.

Morris and Jane grew close again, having weathered many trials together, and Kelmscott was their joint work of art: an ever-changing canvas on which to explore ideas of Romantic design and Romantic living.

After Morris died in 1896, Jane managed to purchase the house outright and lived there with her daughters until her own death, almost twenty years later. The couple are buried together in a simple grave at the edge of the Kelmscott churchyard.

Kelmscott then passed to Jenny and May. Jenny was, sadly, a life-long invalid; but May followed in her father's footsteps, becoming a textile artist and designer in her own right, and a leading member of the local socialist party. With her bold, cheerful friend Mary Lobb at her side, May made her own journeys to Iceland, went on rough camping expeditions around the British Isles, raised goats and other animals, and worked hard to preserve her parents' legacy -- all while creating influential art and craftwork of her own.

Although the Pre-Raphaelite house aesthetic looks quaintly old-fashioned to us now, it is important to remember how fresh and modern it looked at the end of the 19th century, when most Victorian homes were dark, fussy, and overstuffed with furniture, draeries, and decorative objects. By comparison to High Victorian interiors, Morris design was simple, clear, well-crafted, inspired by patterns found in the natural world, and celebrated craft-workers and artisans (potters, dyers, tile painters, metal-workers, etc.), elevated to the status of artists -- which was not then common.

Morris didn't quite achieve his dream of making beautiful objects for the home accessible to everyone. His innovative firm, Morris & Co, made gorgeous objects indeed -- but the slow hand-crafting methods Morris championed (and his socialist obligation to pay his labour force well) resulted in high price tags for his goods. His hand-blocked wallpapers, hand-embroidered textiles, hand-painted furniture, and hand-printed books were simply beyond the reach of most. It was up to the next generation of artists in the Arts & Crafts movement (Gustav Stickley, for example) to take Morris' original vision of Art for All into the world...but that's a story for another day.

This one is at an end.

"If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer: A beautiful House."

- William Morris

"When we can get beyond that smoky world, there, out in the country we may still see the works of our fathers yet alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for."

- William Morris

This post is dedicated, with thanks, to my road-trip companions, Marja and Elizabeth-Jane.

The passage quoted above is from The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood by Jan Marsh (St. Martin's Press, 1985); all rights reserved by the author. The various photographs and artworks are identified in the picture captions. (Run your cursor over the images to see them.) For more information on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, see this previous post: "On Fantasy & the Pre-Raphaelites."

The new issue of EarthLines (a magazine I highly recommend if you're not already a subscriber) is packed with treasures, including an insightful article on "The Language of Moving" by Alex Klaushofer. This captured my attention not only because I've moved many times myself over the course of my life (sometimes willingly, sometimes not, each move disruptive in its own way), but also because our daughter has recently moved back to Chagford after several years in London. It's just for the summer, a pause between the end of her undergraduate studies and the next phase of life (a Masters degree) -- but even this temporary move has thrown up unexpected challenges, reminding me that there is a mythic quality to the act of pulling up roots and transplanting them. It's never truly simple, not on the practical level and especially not in the deeper, barely-conscious realm of dream, soul, and creative inspiration. 

In "The Language of Moving," Klaushofer's relocation from suburban London to the Cotswolds was one she'd chosen and long desired, yet the difficulty of the transition from one sort of life to another took her by surprise:

"Moving brought with it an uprooting, a displacing not acknowledged in the dominant discourse, especially not by those of my generation. Social talk about moving tends to focus relentlessly on the positive, with comments on the excitement that a new house and surroundings will bring. Perhaps not surpringly, since they come from a time when life was less atomized, it is older people who seem to understand the rupture involved in changing place.  My eighty-something godmother enquires solicitiously again and again as to how I am feeling: am I settling? Do I feel strange?"

A little later in the article she comes back to the general absence of societal recognition of just how difficult moving can be:

"I'm coming to think that this absence is part of a broader lack in our language about our relation to place. Standard English has just one word for feelings of longing for a particular place: 'homesick.' The word implies a polarity: you are at home or away, and suggests the simple solution of going home; it carries no sense of the process of adapting to a new place or of mixed or complex feelings. Other languages of the British Isles do much better at capturing the range of feelings and experiences that make up the human attachment to place. Welsh has 'hiraeth,' a word that connotes a yearning for place that is lost or may not exist, a feeling of longing to be 'at home' in the sense of achieving a sense of belonging, of finding your paradise. Its cognate 'cynefin' denotes 'habitat' or 'customary abode'; the place which formed you, and with which you are most familiar. In a definition which encompasses cultural, social and geographical influences, Nicholas Sinclair describes it as 'the place of your birth and upbringing, the environment in which you live and to which you are naturally acclimatized.' The Scottish Gaelic 'dùthchas' conveys the collective nature of a heritage that connects people to a particular place, historically also the tribal system of land rights accorded to the members of a clan. The fact that the Scottish Gaelic equivalent of homesickness, nostalgia or longing for home, cianalas, has given rise to a genre of Gaelic poetry written by emigrees called bàrdachd cianalais is perhaps testament to how a profound sense of rootedness finds linguistic expression."

We think of moving as a straightforward proposition: the bags are packed, the house is emptied, the old door is shut and locked one final time, and then we're to the next adventure. Hey ho, here we go! We arrive in our new location: the suitcase is unpacked, the books placed in their new setting, morning coffee is poured into familiar cups but the kitchen window has a brand new view ... yet after the relief that the move is finally "over" often comes a sense of ... flatness. Of nameless anxiety. Of self-doubt and three-in-the-morning fears that the move was a terrible mistake.

"This is all perfectly normal," we assure our daughter, as she misses London and finds herself doubting all the reasons she'd had for coming back home. I remember friends making similar assurances to me after various uprootings. We don't move from one phase of life to another as easily and clearly as stepping through a door; there is a time of transition, a liminal space between there and here to be moved through as we re-form into the person who is going to live in this new place. The length of time is different for each move, but the one thing I've learned after all these years is that the mythic journey through the threshold of change is shorter, gentler, and less overwhelming if we remain aware of the transitional process, and accept it. Better still, respect it.

Klaushofer notes that we have more words in English for the various aspects of "attachment to place" when it comes to animals, not human beings. Such as this one from sheep husbandry:

" 'Hefting' describes the process by which a ewe learns, traditionally through its mother, to stay in one particular area; once 'hefted,' the hill farmer has no need to confine the flock with fences because it will naturally incline to one pasture.

"The existence of a word for the ovine attachment to place is a reminder that, in its sparsity, our language of place forgets that we too are animals, with a pre-cognitive, non-economic attachment to the places we inhabit. Like the fox I used to see patrolling the streets of south London at the same time and in the same order every day, humans also have their runs and routines, whether built around exercise, dog walking or errands, that reflect their attachement to their habitat. Yet in a post-agricultural society which fosters a belief in our independence from the earth we almost never think in these terms."

Settled in the Cotswolds, but not yet truly settled, Klausofer writes:

"I'm aware that I haven't quite hefted, that I'm in the midst of a transition, the in-between time that goes unacknowledged in the dominant discourse about moving."

Hefted. That's a wonderful word, and one I will remember and use.

For further insights into the art of moving place, I recommend reading Klaushofer's article in full.

The art today is by Helen Allingham (1848-1926), a Victorian painter, illustrator, and the first woman artist granted full membership in the Royal Watercolour Society. Born in Derbyshire, raised in Birmingham, Allingham was encouraged in art from an early age -- for both her grandmother and her aunt were professional artists, which was still unusual at that time. She studied art at the Birmingham School of Design, at the National Art Training School in London (now the Royal School of Art), and in night classes at the Slade -- where she met fellow illustrator Kate Greenaway, a life-long friend. Over the course of her professional career she illustrated books for both children and adults, and created art for national newspapers and popular magazines.

In 1874 she married the Scottish poet William Allingham (author of The Fairies: "Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen,/We daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men..."). The couple moved from London to Sussex to raise their family, where Allingham fell in love with the rural landscape and began the work for which she is best known: watercolors of women, children, animals, and the country cottages of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent.

Although her work has largely fallen out of favor, castigated for its Victorian sentimentality, her gentle renditions of domestic life are known to have influenced many younger artists, including the young Vincent van Gogh (who found them in English magazines). In preparing this post, and thinking of artists whose work demonstrates a deep love of "place" and "home," Helen Allingham came immediately to mind.

The passage above by Alex Klaushofer is from "The Language of Moving" (EarthLines: The Culture of Nature, edited by David Knowles & Sharon Blackie, July 2016); all rights reserved by the author. Related posts: Kith & Kin. and Hiraeth. A related essay: The Folklore of Hearth & Home.