Rumer Godden
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Rumer Godden OBE |
|
|---|---|
| Born | Margaret Rumer Godden 10 December 1907 Eastbourne, Sussex, England |
| Died | 8 November 1998 (aged 90) Moniaive, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet and children's story writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Notable works |
Black Narcissus, The River, The Greengage Summer, The Doll's House |
| Notable awards | Whitbread Award for Children's Literature (1972) |
| Spouse |
|
| Children | Jane (Foster) Murray Flutter Paula (Foster) Kenilworth |
Margaret Rumer Godden OBE (10 December 1907 – 8 November 1998) was an English author of more than 60 fiction and nonfiction books written under the name of Rumer Godden. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947.
A few of her works were co-written with her older sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.
Godden was born in Eastbourne,Sussex, England. She grew up with her three sisters in Narayanganj, colonial India (now in Bangladesh), where her shipping company executive father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Her parents sent the girls to England for schooling, as was the custom of the time, but brought them back to Narayanganj when the First World War began. Godden returned to the United Kingdom with her sisters to continue her interrupted schooling in 1920, spending time at Moira House Girls School in Eastbourne and eventually training as a dance teacher. She went back to Calcutta in 1925 and opened a dance school for English and Indian children. Godden ran the school for 20 years with the help of her sister Nancy. During this time she published her first best-seller, the 1939 novel Black Narcissus.
After eight years in an unhappy marriage entered into in 1934 because she was pregnant, she moved in 1942 with her two daughters Jane and Paula (her husband Laurence Foster having joined the army) to Kashmir, living first on a houseboat and then in a rented house where she started a farm. After a mysterious incident in which it appeared that an attempt had been made to poison both her and her daughters she returned to Calcutta in 1944; the novel Kingfishers Catch Fire was based on her time in Kashmir. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1945 to concentrate on her writing, moving house frequently but living mostly in Sussex and London, and was divorced in 1948. After returning from America to oversee the script for the movie of her book The River, Godden married civil servant James Haynes Dixon on 26 November 1949.
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