Rumer Godden

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RG was a popular writer for much of the twentieth century, author of about seventy books: more than twenty novels for adults (some drawing on her own experiences), as well as about the same number of story-books for children, biographies, and several volumes of more or less fictionalised memoirs. Her earliest publications were of poetry; she once spent a whole afternoon writing a poem in her head;
Godden, Rumer. Rungli-Rungliot. P. Davies, 1944.
97
and she published five poetry collections. She later said, however, that she was not a poet, though on occasion she felt like one.
  • BirthName: Margaret Rumer Godden
    Godden, she says, is a common name in Kent and Sussex. RG was named after her maternal grandmother, Harriet Rumer Moore Hingley.
    Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
    5
    Rumer was a marvellous name for a writer; I have never met another.
    Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
    9

  • Nickname: Peggie
    This was what her family called her. She first put Peggie behind her and signed a letter Rumer Godden the summer she was thirty-five.
    Chisholm, Anne. Rumer Godden, A Storyteller’s Life. Pan Books, 1999.
    67, 163

  • Married: Foster; Haynes-Dixon

Milestones

10 December 1907

RG was born at Eastbourne in Sussex, where her parents were visiting from India.
Rosenthal, Lynne. Rumer Godden Revisited. Twayne, 1996.
xv

By August 1953

RG published one of her best-known novels, Kingfishers Catch Fire, titled from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins .
British Book News. British Council.
(1953): 477

By September 1958

RG published another of her best-known novels, The Greengage Summer, a bildungsroman.
British Book News. British Council.
(1958): 631

15 November 1997

Just a year before she died RG published her final novel, Cromartie v. the God Shiva, Acting through the Government of India; it shares part of its setting with the one that preceded it.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

8 November 1998

RG died in a nursing home in Dumfries, Scotland, after a series of strokes.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

10 December 1907

RG was born at Eastbourne in Sussex, where her parents were visiting from India.
Rosenthal, Lynne. Rumer Godden Revisited. Twayne, 1996.
xv