Synopsis
“A novel of sensitive dedication.” —The Atlantic Monthly
“Rumer Godden deals precisely with the theme of the religious life . . . as representing ‘the heart of holiness of the Church.’ It is at once a life of great peace and often equally intense struggle.” —America magazine
This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community. In this gripping narrative of the crises surrounding the ancient Brede abbey, Rumer Godden penetrates to the mysterious, inner heart of a religious community—a place of complexity and conflict, as well as joy and love. It is a place where Philippa, to her own surprise and her friends’ astonishment, finds her life by losing it.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Rumer Godden (1907–98) was born in England, began writing fiction as an adult living in India, and continued a successful writing career after moving back to England. She is the author of many novels , including In This House of Brede, Black Narcissus, The River, and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.
From the Back Cover
“A novel of sensitive dedication.” —The Atlantic Monthly
“Rumer Godden deals precisely with the theme of the religious life . . . as representing ‘the heart of holiness of the Church.’ It is at once a life of great peace and often equally intense struggle.” —America magazine
This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community. In this gripping narrative of the crises surrounding the ancient Brede abbey, Rumer Godden penetrates to the mysterious, inner heart of a religious community—a place of complexity and conflict, as well as joy and love. It is a place where Philippa, to her own surprise and her friends’ astonishment, finds her life by losing it.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Phyllis Tickle
Phyllis Tickle
The motto was “Pax,” but the word was set in a circle of thorns.
In This House of Brede opens with that sentence, and any introduction to Godden’s work dare not do less. “Peace” above the door, but a crown of thorns surrounding it.
Eastern Orthodoxy has, almost from the beginning, had the clearest aesthetic of all of Christianity about religious art, whether the art be in stone or paint or music or words. The Orthodox Church teaches its artist/believers that holy art must always be informed by and saturated with a certain and “bright sadness.” Divine art must always be pervaded by a sweet mixture—deep, compassionate sorrow for the sin and sorrows of this present life commingled with a luminous joy over the promised salvation and relief, which are promised by the one who can never promise in vain. That certain and bright sadness informs every Byzantine painting that has ever been hallowed and every iconostasis that has ever been venerated. Though Rumer Godden was a Roman Catholic rather than Eastern in her profession, that certain and bright sadness that pervades Orthodoxy informs her great novel, In This House of Brede.
Philippa Talbot is Godden’s protagonist, the icon who becomes saturated with the bright sadness over the course of the story of Brede. When we first meet her, she is a well-tailored, striking widow of considerable accomplishment in government service who has gone as far as she can go in the formation of her own soul. Further progress requires some radical interruption in her ways of being in the world. She is a disciplined woman, but of a generous disposition. This is as it should be in a Christian. She has managed to change a passionate affair with a married lover into one of companionship without infidelity, albeit at great personal cost and pain to both of them. This, too, is as it should be. She even has come to understand that her marriage, though it was ended by her husband’s death, was in essence a failed one; and she accepts with contrition that the failure was as much her fault as his.
Philippa carries with her as well the eternal agony of a personal tragedy buried deep in her past. The memory of her desperate, pleading words during those moments course like an antiphon through every day and every night of Philippa’s life. They become a dark motif, a constant chant of the grief that informs Philippa’s way of coming to the House of Brede.
Philippa seeks admission to Brede, a Benedictine monastery near the sea in the south of England. A fictional place based on Stanbrook Convent and St. Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde, Isle of Wight, Brede is a holy place inhabited by very human sinners called to a very particular form of service to God. The cloistered nuns have one single, overarching vocation. They are called to the life of prayer. Everything else is subsumed under that one duty: prayer. In choir and away from it, the nuns pray. They know that it is in this way only that the world is changed. God flows through the nuns into human affairs, and human affairs flow back to God in the same way. Conduits of conversation between the divine and the human, they discipline themselves toward the purity of soul required to be a good and trustworthy portal between two realms. The aim and the result of such a life is peace, as the motto above the entrance to the House of Brede says. But the peace to be gained and effected at Brede is, as Brede’s Lord said, “My peace, and not as the world gives.”
Philippa’s story can be read on several levels. In This House of Brede is probably the most accessible, accurate, and sympathetic presentation of monastic life in all of English literature. I have often sent copies of it to friends who want to better grasp what a monastery actually is, how it is organized, and why it exists. In fact, I first came to know Brede a quarter-century ago in precisely that way. I had been asking about monasteries; a colleague of mine, Judy Platt of the Association of American Publishers, sent me a copy of Brede as the definitive answer. She was right. Since then, I have returned to Brede more than once. In fact, with the exception of the Bible, it is the only book I have ever read more than three times.
One can certainly read In This House of Brede as the finely honed story it is. Rumer Godden was a consummate artist long before she was a Christian, and she never betrays her craft, not even to make a doctrinal point. The skills of rich characterization that she brings to her nuns are marvelous to behold. Godden’s women fairly dance across her pages, each one as credible as a favorite aunt or—sometimes—a distressing mother-in-law. (Caveat: One does not love all the sisters at Brede, but one does believe them.)
From the beginning, it is also apparent that one can engage this tale as simply a fictional but very realistic biography of Philippa Talbot. The progress of her soul is translucent, open to our view, entirely plausible. But any of these readings of Brede—an exploration of monastic life, a wonderful story, a biography of Philippa—is incomplete unless pursued in combination with yet one other way of knowing the story.
As with the Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Progress, so with Philippa. She is every searcher after Christian truth; and Brede is the microcosm we each inhabit. Our stories are not hers but the stuff of our souls is identical to hers and, Godden lets us understand, identical as well to that of every other follower of the Christ. We are all vowed, and we forget that to our own peril. We forget it as well to the peril of the community of which we are member-parts. We belong by virtue of communion and confession to that larger house of which Brede is not more than an exemplary image.
Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907, reared from infancy in India, returned to England as an adult, and died in Scotland in 1998. She wrote more than sixty works during her life, works that included novels (Black Narcissus, The River), children’s books (The Kitchen Madonna, St. Jerome and the Lion), poetry (The Creatures’ Choir) and nonfiction (Two under the Indian Sun).
Godden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1968 at the age of sixty. Of it, she would later say, “I like the way everything is clear and concise. You’ll always be forgiven, but you must know the rules.” The poignancy and the unguarded candor of that profession take on an added persuasion when one understands that, in preparing to write In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden lived for three years at the gate of an English Benedictine abbey. The experience changed her life. It certainly has changed mine. And I assume it is about to change yours as well. Traveling mercies.
Philippa Talbot is Godden’s protagonist, the icon who becomes saturated with the bright sadness over the course of the story of Brede. When we first meet her, she is a well-tailored, striking widow of considerable accomplishment in government service who has gone as far as she can go in the formation of her own soul. Further progress requires some radical interruption in her ways of being in the world. She is a disciplined woman, but of a generous disposition. This is as it should be in a Christian. She has managed to change a passionate affair with a married lover into one of companionship without infidelity, albeit at great personal cost and pain to both of them. This, too, is as it should be. She even has come to understand that her marriage, though it was ended by her husband’s death, was in essence a failed one; and she accepts with contrition that the failure was as much her fault as his.
Philippa carries with her as well the eternal agony of a personal tragedy buried deep in her past. The memory of her desperate, pleading words during those moments course like an antiphon through every day and every night of Philippa’s life. They become a dark motif, a constant chant of the grief that informs Philippa’s way of coming to the House of Brede.
Philippa seeks admission to Brede, a Benedictine monastery near the sea in the south of England. A fictional place based on Stanbrook Convent and St. Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde, Isle of Wight, Brede is a holy place inhabited by very human sinners called to a very particular form of service to God. The cloistered nuns have one single, overarching vocation. They are called to the life of prayer. Everything else is subsumed under that one duty: prayer. In choir and away from it, the nuns pray. They know that it is in this way only that the world is changed. God flows through the nuns into human affairs, and human affairs flow back to God in the same way. Conduits of conversation between the divine and the human, they discipline themselves toward the purity of soul required to be a good and trustworthy portal between two realms. The aim and the result of such a life is peace, as the motto above the entrance to the House of Brede says. But the peace to be gained and effected at Brede is, as Brede’s Lord said, “My peace, and not as the world gives.”
Philippa’s story can be read on several levels. In This House of Brede is probably the most accessible, accurate, and sympathetic presentation of monastic life in all of English literature. I have often sent copies of it to friends who want to better grasp what a monastery actually is, how it is organized, and why it exists. In fact, I first came to know Brede a quarter-century ago in precisely that way. I had been asking about monasteries; a colleague of mine, Judy Platt of the Association of American Publishers, sent me a copy of Brede as the definitive answer. She was right. Since then, I have returned to Brede more than once. In fact, with the exception of the Bible, it is the only book I have ever read more than three times.
One can certainly read In This House of Brede as the finely honed story it is. Rumer Godden was a consummate artist long before she was a Christian, and she never betrays her craft, not even to make a doctrinal point. The skills of rich characterization that she brings to her nuns are marvelous to behold. Godden’s women fairly dance across her pages, each one as credible as a favorite aunt or—sometimes—a distressing mother-in-law. (Caveat: One does not love all the sisters at Brede, but one does believe them.)
From the beginning, it is also apparent that one can engage this tale as simply a fictional but very realistic biography of Philippa Talbot. The progress of her soul is translucent, open to our view, entirely plausible. But any of these readings of Brede—an exploration of monastic life, a wonderful story, a biography of Philippa—is incomplete unless pursued in combination with yet one other way of knowing the story.
As with the Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Progress, so with Philippa. She is every searcher after Christian truth; and Brede is the microcosm we each inhabit. Our stories are not hers but the stuff of our souls is identical to hers and, Godden lets us understand, identical as well to that of every other follower of the Christ. We are all vowed, and we forget that to our own peril. We forget it as well to the peril of the community of which we are member-parts. We belong by virtue of communion and confession to that larger house of which Brede is not more than an exemplary image.
Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907, reared from infancy in India, returned to England as an adult, and died in Scotland in 1998. She wrote more than sixty works during her life, works that included novels (Black Narcissus, The River), children’s books (The Kitchen Madonna, St. Jerome and the Lion), poetry (The Creatures’ Choir) and nonfiction (Two under the Indian Sun).
Godden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1968 at the age of sixty. Of it, she would later say, “I like the way everything is clear and concise. You’ll always be forgiven, but you must know the rules.” The poignancy and the unguarded candor of that profession take on an added persuasion when one understands that, in preparing to write In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden lived for three years at the gate of an English Benedictine abbey. The experience changed her life. It certainly has changed mine. And I assume it is about to change yours as well. Traveling mercies.
In This House of Brede
All the characters in this book are imaginary, but many of the episodes are based on fact; some are taken from the life and sayings of Dame Laurentia McLachlan and Sister Mary Ann McArdle of Stanbrook Abbey. To many monasteries of Benedictine nuns I owe most grateful thanks; especially do I offer them to our English Abbeys of Stanbrook, Talacre, and Ryde. My thanks go also to Mr. M. Kinihiro of the Information Center, Embassy of Japan (London), for constant help given, and to James Kirkup, poet, for permission to quote from his book Return to Japan.
R. G.
R. G.
Prologue
The motto was “Pax,” but the word was set in a circle of thorns. Pax: peace, but what a strange peace, made of unremitting toil and effort, seldom with a seen result; subject to constant interruptions, unexpected demands, short sleep at nights, little comfort, sometimes scant food; beset with disappointments and usually misunderstood; yet peace all the same, undeviating, filled with joy and gratitude and love. “It is my own peace I give unto you.” Not, notice, the world’s peace.
Penelope Stevens never forgot that morning. It was New Year’s Day, “which made it all the more heartbreaking,” she told her young husband, Donald, afterward.
“Heartbreaking?” Penny could imagine the amused lilt in Mrs. Talbot’s voice if she had heard that. “Isn’t the first day of the year a good time to begin?”
To Penny it had not felt a good time to do anything; she and Donald had been up till four o’clock dancing the New Year in at one of Donald’s “important” parties, “which was why, perhaps, I was so dim,” said Penny.
“Mrs. Stevens, I have spoken to you twice! You are here to work, you know.”
“Sorry, Miss Bowman.”
Joyce Bowman was personal assistant to “the mighty woman,” as Donald called Mrs. Talbot, and was important to those who wished to “get on,” as Donald was always urging. For a while Penny’s fingers went so fast on the typewriter keys that she slurred letters together and had to start again with fresh sheets of paper. “Three sheets!” she could imagine Miss Bowman scolding, and, “You would never have been given this post,” the typing-pool superintendent told Penny, “never, if Mrs. Talbot hadn’t taken one of her fancies to you.”
“Taken a fancy to me?” Penny had been astonished. “Why, she’s as cold as . . . a flick knife,” said Penny.
“Flick knife was a good simile,” Mrs. Talbot said when, long afterward, Penny told her this story. “I used to flick people. I still do. I must learn not to.”
Penny had known something was going on. Mr. Marshall, from overseas press division, had had a desk in Mrs. Talbot’s room all the week. There had been talks—“but there often are”—there had been private meetings. If Penny had put into words what she ...
“Heartbreaking?” Penny could imagine the amused lilt in Mrs. Talbot’s voice if she had heard that. “Isn’t the first day of the year a good time to begin?”
To Penny it had not felt a good time to do anything; she and Donald had been up till four o’clock dancing the New Year in at one of Donald’s “important” parties, “which was why, perhaps, I was so dim,” said Penny.
“Mrs. Stevens, I have spoken to you twice! You are here to work, you know.”
“Sorry, Miss Bowman.”
Joyce Bowman was personal assistant to “the mighty woman,” as Donald called Mrs. Talbot, and was important to those who wished to “get on,” as Donald was always urging. For a while Penny’s fingers went so fast on the typewriter keys that she slurred letters together and had to start again with fresh sheets of paper. “Three sheets!” she could imagine Miss Bowman scolding, and, “You would never have been given this post,” the typing-pool superintendent told Penny, “never, if Mrs. Talbot hadn’t taken one of her fancies to you.”
“Taken a fancy to me?” Penny had been astonished. “Why, she’s as cold as . . . a flick knife,” said Penny.
“Flick knife was a good simile,” Mrs. Talbot said when, long afterward, Penny told her this story. “I used to flick people. I still do. I must learn not to.”
Penny had known something was going on. Mr. Marshall, from overseas press division, had had a desk in Mrs. Talbot’s room all the week. There had been talks—“but there often are”—there had been private meetings. If Penny had put into words what she ...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Other Popular Editions of the Same Title
Search results for In This House of Brede
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: HPB Inc., Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_456502592
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: HPB-Diamond, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_459511234
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: HPB-Ruby, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_463429627
Seller Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: Placitas Community Library, a non-profit organization, Placitas, NM, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
This book has no rips or stains. The spine is tight and intact. The spine does have two creases, but no loose pages and no breaks. The pages are yellowed with age. Placitas Community Library is a small rural library located in an unincorporated area. All proceeds help pay for the operating expenses of the library. Seller Inventory # ABE-1769961848453
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: Better World Books Ltd, Dunfermline, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 1028505-6
Buy Used
US$ 10.69
US$ 6.75 shipping
Ships from United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Ships from United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Quantity: 1 available
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: GoldBooks, Denver, CO, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 78J91_46_0829421289
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: St Vincent de Paul of Lane County, Eugene, OR, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. paperback 100% of proceeds go to charity! Good condition with all pages in tact. Item shows signs of use and may have cosmetic defects. Seller Inventory # 2GG-03-2775
Stock Image
In This House of Brede
Seller: Revaluation Books, Exeter, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Brand New. reissue edition. 656 pages. 7.25x5.25x1.50 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # 0829421289
Buy New
US$ 81.56
US$ 13.49 shipping
Ships from United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Ships from United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Quantity: 1 available