Rumer Godden, 90; Prolific Author

Rumer Godden, prolific author who infused her 21 novels and two dozen children’s books with her love of India, has died. She was 90.

Godden, who saw several of her novels converted into motion pictures, died Sunday in a nursing home in Thornhill, Scotland, according to her publisher, Macmillan.

The writer, whose 21st novel, “Cromartie vs. The God Shiva,” was published last year, was born Margaret Rumer Godden in Sussex, England, and brought up in India. She often said she had been “going backward and forward ever since, perpetually homesick for one or the other.”

“Her books reflect this duality, not within themselves, but in swinging back and forth from England to India,” former Times book editor Robert R. Kirsch observed in 1957. “All have one important thing in common: They are beautifully and simply wrought by a woman of depth and sensitivity.”

In 1958, he reviewed her “The Greengage Summer” as “pure Rumer Godden, which means depth in a small focus, deceptively simple expression with enormous complexity and wrapped in a style which is poetic and compelling.”

“She sees life as it really must be,” Kirsch wrote, “touched by wit and quiet humor and suffering in turn sometime and all at once other times.”

That book was turned into a film titled “Loss of Innocence,” starring Danielle Darrieux and Susannah York in 1961.

Educated in writing and dance at Moira House in Eastbourne, England, Godden once operated a children’s ballet school in Calcutta. But writing became her career when she published her first novel, “Chinese Puzzle,” in 1936 while pregnant with her first child.

She had published four novels by the time her marriage to stockbroker and gambler Laurence Sinclair Foster ended in 1941, when he abandoned her and their two daughters penniless in Calcutta.

It was her third novel, the best-seller “Black Narcissus,” which established Godden in world literature. The book about nuns founding a convent in India’s Himalayas, made into a motion picture starring Deborah Kerr in 1947, remains Godden’s most famous work.

She wrote several subsequent novels about nuns, and her research prompted her to convert to Catholicism in 1968.

Godden assisted director Jean Renoir in adapting her novel “The River,” about English children growing up in Bengal, for the screen in 1951. Her novels “The Battle of the Villa Fiorita” and “In This House of Brede” also became motion pictures.

The author occasionally wrote with her sister, Jon, including their 1966 memoir “Two Under the Indian Sun.”

Godden’s children’s books earned several international literary awards including America’s Children’s Books of the Year and Parents Choice Award, as well as a place on the International Board on Books for Young People Honor List.

Among her much-loved works for children were “The Doll’s House,” her first, in 1947, “The Mousewife,” “The Fairy Doll,” “Candy Floss,” “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle” and “Mr. McFadden’s Halloween.”

Godden said she was inspired to try her first children’s story to see “if I could write a real novel--a murder story--in the tiny compass of a doll’s house, and make it acceptable for children.”

Her nonfiction included a biography of Hans Christian Andersen and children’s collections of the poetry of Emily Dickinson and French poet Carmen Bernos de Gasztold.

Godden moved to England in 1945 and four years later married civil servant James Haynes-Dixon. He died in 1973.

The author was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

She is survived by her two daughters, Paula Kenilworth and Jane Murray Flutter, four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.