And then, and that was the third time, I said, “Yes, I will.” But it didn’t help. I was lying on stones and the walls were moving in. There had been a light sprinkling of snow but with no sun to make it sparkle it had seemed not beautiful but bitter and sad. I did manage to say, “Yes, I will,” but I think I only said it three times and each time saying it was like lifting a mountain, so reluctant was I. It had been my worst day, after a sleepless night, and one of the worst things about it was that I had stopped being aware of the double thing. It was a dream I had, a little while before Christmas. In classic Goudge manner, she holds in equal significance the joyful realization of God’s faithfulness and the journey through the dark valley that typically precedes that insight. Goudge/Cousin Mary tactfully brings us through an intensely spiritual experience of wrestling through these emotions that can be thrust upon anyone at any time. But she doesn’t leave us-the readers-there. In moments like the following, Goudge beautifully expresses the downward spiral to seeming hopelessness. Against all odds, though, her lifelong struggle with these conditions did not hinder her desire to understand them or her reliance on God to prevail through the pain. What we learn from Cousin Mary’s life is that she dealt with severe recurring depression and anxiety. The previous quote is an excerpt from one of her diaries, as is the following. While the majority of the novel is spent with Mary herself, we get peeks into her cousin Mary’s life via journal entries. With a healthy amount of curiosity and apprehension, she finds herself drawn to this place that she fell in love with as a child and drawn to explore her late cousin’s life through her journals. In The Scent of Water, the main character Mary Lindsay boldly decides to abandon her urban London life for a cottage bequeathed to her by her cousin, also named Mary, who she met one single time in her youth. However, this time I found myself taken not so much with the paradoxical nature of joy and sorrow in the human experience, but instead with the natural and honest way she discusses depression and fear and pulls us into and out of such desperate, fierce mentalities. As the below excerpt shows, she does the same in The Scent of Water. As I discussed in a blog post about Towers in the Mist a year ago, Goudge deftly navigates moments that are intimately woven with pain and love. There was the bad thing, fear and darkness pressing in, and there was the glad singing of love, the “Yes, I will,” that is my song.Įlizabeth Goudge is a master of words, but even more than that she is a master of noticing and putting into writing the delicate human emotions that ring through our hearts but are rarely verbalized. This time what I went through was a double thing, two strands twisted together of black and gold. By Maggie Swofford, Marketing & Editorial Assistant
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