Sister of the Angels: Week 1

Goudge's Angels, Torminster's Christ Child, and Complex Characters

Photo of a snowy Vicar’s Close in Wells, UK by The Mansion Museum

“Torminster looked very lovely under its mantle of snow... The slanting, snow covered roofs, all of different heights and shapes, belonging to houses that had grown up like flowers one by one through the centuries, looked like tumbled mountain slopes, and the cold air was like the rarefied air one breaths high up in the sky...”

🌟Elizabeth Goudge, Sister of the Angels

Welcome to our first discussion for Sister of the Angels!

We will be reading this book over just the next three weeks, having our live book chat on Wednesday, December 18th at 3pm EST, and our last discussion post on the 20th before Christmas. Today we are looking at chapters 1-3.

Goudge’s fondness for Christmas

If you take a look through Goudge’s novels and short stories, you will find that Christmas was a season that she included very often. She seemed to adore the theology of the incarnation, and she gives it birth in new ways for us when she writes about the Christ in her stories. And so even though she has already included a Christmas chapter in A City of Bells, here we find an entire story about Christmas at Torminster in Sister of the Angels.

Today we will take a look at the angels in Henrietta’s room, the figures on the inverted arch of Wells, the use of the Jesse Tree in art, Henrietta’s experience of the Torminster Cathedral, and we will also look at Goudge’s complex characters. Glad you can join us!

C Walter Hodge’s illustration of the snowy rooftops of Torminster. GGB edition

Angels in Henrietta’s Room