Intro to Towers in the Mist

February Goudge Readalong 2024

Feb 01, 2024

“It was the first of May, and winter had died in the storm of the previous night, so he knew it would be a sunrise worth waiting for. Suddenly, from high over his head, a lark, the plowman’s clock, sang a quick stave of song, and from the unseen woods below, a robin called. The heaven had cried out for joy and the earth had answered, and between the two the smell of the horse rose up like ascending prayer and linked them together. Music and scent were alive once more in the world..”

🌿 Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist

Welcome to our February Goudge Readalong: Towers in the Mist!

Welcome to Elizabethan Oxford for our February Goudge read. Here is the list of books for the rest of the year if you are interested in knowing what is coming next: Goudge Readalong 2024. All you need to join in is a copy of the book! If you still need a copy, grab a paperback or Kindle here: Towers in the Mist.

Goudge’s fourth novel

Towers in the Mist was Goudge’s fourth novel: Island Magic was published in 1934, The Middle Window in 1935, A City of Bells in 1936 and Towers in the Mist was published in 1938. When it was reviewed by the New York Times, the critic said:

(Towers in the Mist) “breathes the same spirit of joyousness that distinguished A City of Bells… It was be well-nigh impossible to read this book without being caught in the web of enchantment which the writer has woven about the city.”

Set in Elizabethan Oxford

Goudge had moved to Oxford with her father and mother in 1923, in to the house at the corner of Tom Quad, which she used for the home of the Gervas Leigh family in Towers. But all was not easy writing this novel. Here is what Goudge herself had to say about it to the Romantic Novelists' Association:

“I remember many years ago, when I was a young and struggling writer; that I made up my mind to try and write a story about sixteenth-century Oxford. I thought it would be easy for I was living in twentieth-century Oxford, history was all about me and my home was actually in the Tom Quad that Wolsey built. I tramped about Oxford, I read all the books I could lay hands on, I wrote a few lifeless chapters and they stuck as hopelessly as a fly in treacle. It was no good. I was still in the twentieth century.
Then in despair I started going to all the quiet places I knew of and being in them as though I had nothing else in the world to do. I went to Magdalen cloisters and sat there alone. I went to a particular spot by the Cherwell where the kingfishers nested and listened to the sound of the water and watched for the flash of blue. I went to St. Michael's at the North Gate and settled down in one of the pews with only the shadows for company, and the heavy door so firmly shut that the sound of distant traffic faded to a drone of bees. And then at last my mind moved from the living present to the living past as easily as a body walks from one room to another. All writers know the experience well. It makes such words as death, time, past and present, oddly unreal.”1

Thomas Nashe

Goudge begins Towers in the Mist with a poem by Thomas Nashe:

Spring, the sweet spring

BY THOMAS NASHE

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,

Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,

And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,

Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,

In every street these tunes our ears do greet:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!

Spring, the sweet spring!

We will be reading roughly the first eight chapters of Goudge’s Elizabethan novel by mid-February, and finishing the rest of the book for a discussion at the end of the month. There will be information about many a poet and many historic Oxfordian places this month - including a look into Goudge’s Oxford garden at Rose Cottage! Looking forward to digging in with you all!

These photos with Towers in the Mist are of May in my garden to lighten our hearts for our February Goudge Readalong!