Back to Keyhaven... and Oxford
The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge
“One of the things in my working life about which I am most thankful is that someone or something prompted me to write three books about… Damerosehay, and that those three seem to be my readers’ favourites. As long as the three books are read Damerosehay has not quite vanished from the world and I have not lived in vain.”
Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow, ch 14
Moving back to Oxfordshire
In 1953, Goudge published the last of the Eliot books, The Heart of the Family, letting her readers return to her beloved Damerosehay and its setting in the Keyhave Marshes. But Goudge herself was also making a return. She moved house herself to Rose Cottage, south of Oxford near Henley-on-Thames. After over a decade, she was returning to Oxfordshire, and she was not overjoyed about it, it seems.
After many hard years of nursing her sick mother and writing to support them, Goudge (reluctantly at first) took on a live-in housekeeper, Jessie Monroe, to help take care of domestic things while she did her work.
Christine Rawlins writes that Jessie said of that season:
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