Biography
Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge was born on 24 April 1900 in the cathedral city of Wells, where her father, Henry Leighton Goudge, was vice-principal of the Theological College. The family moved to Ely when he became principal of the Theological College there and then to Christ Church, Oxford when he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at the University. Elizabeth was educated at Grassendale School, Southbourne (1914–18), and at the art school at University College Reading, then an extension college of Christ Church. She went on to teach design and handicrafts in Ely and Oxford.
Goudge's first book, The Fairies' Baby and Other Stories (1919), was a failure and it was several years before she wrote her first novel, Island Magic (1934), which was an immediate success. It was based on Channel Island stories, many of which she had learned from her mother, a native of Guernsey. Elizabeth herself regularly visited Guernsey as a child, and recalled in her autobiography The Joy of the Snow spending many of her summers with her maternal grandparents and relatives.
For The Little White Horse, published by the University of London Press in 1946, Goudge won the annual Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. It was her own favourite among her works and J. K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, has said that it was her favourite childhood book. The television mini-series Moonacre and the 2009 film The Secret of Moonacre were based on The Little White Horse.
Green Dolphin Country (1944) was adapted as a film under its U.S. title, Green Dolphin Street, which won the Academy Award for Special Effects in 1948.
After her father's death in 1939, Goudge moved to a bungalow in Devon, where she nursed her ailing mother. After her mother's death in 1951, she moved to Oxfordshire, spending the last 30 years of her life living at a cottage on Peppard Common, just outside Henley-on-Thames, where a blue plaque was unveiled in 2008.
Goudge was a founding member of the Romantic Novelists' Association in 1960 and later its vice president.
She died on 1 April 1984.
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