The real story behind Black Narcissus, the escapist fantasy that put its fearless author on the map
A BBC adaptation will introduce Rumer Godden’s 1938 masterpiece – about the conflict between sensual and cerebral – to a new audience
27 December 2020 • 5:00pm
Rumer Godden never changed the working habits she established in the Thirties
Credit: Clifford Coffin/Conde Nast Collection Editorial
The reflection in her mirror displeased novelist Rumer Godden in the late summer of 1938. Dispassionately, she itemised what she saw. Her eyes, she wrote, were serious, her forehead clever, but a “weak little chin” and “easily sensual mouth, overlarge and over-easy” outweighed any good impression. Weeks away from the birth of her second child, increasingly ambivalent about her absent husband, worried about money, struggling to balance motherhood with writing, Godden gave in to sharp self-criticism.