Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) was a Christian writer widely read and appreciated in the mid-twentieth century. Her book, The Little White Horse, won the Carnegie Medal in 1946. J.K. Rowling identified that book as her childhood favorite, and said that it had “a direct influence on the Harry Potter books.” A later novel, Green Dolphin Street, was produced as a film which won an Academy Award. Per Amazon: “In style and themes she parallels English writers such as the creator of the Miss Read series as well mirroring the spiritual depth found in George MacDonald’s Victorian novels.”
The Dean’s Watch is one of Goudge’s most penetrating works, and one of Goudge’s own three favorite books. Per Amazon, again, it is a “compelling saga of an unlikely friendship threaded together by redemption and grace. Dean of the cathedral in an 1870s English town, Adam Ayscough is respected and misunderstood. A dogged crusader against corruption, he’s also acutely shy. When his watch breaks, he forms an unlikely friendship with watchmaker Isaac Peabody, who doesn’t think he has anything in common with God.”
In Elizabeth Goudge’s own words: “As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic 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.”
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