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A reading space opens when a reader meets a text. It is shaped by both material and immaterial elements. This article explores this concept through the example of Rumer Godden's The Story of Holly and Ivy, via investigating the reading space first opened by the author at age 9.

Rumer Godden's 1969 novel, In This House of Brede, transcends linear time in its account of a divinely inspired vocation. As Brede relates the events surrounding a monastery of Roman Catholic nuns, the novel's blending of past, present, and future—along with an indeterminate beginning and open-ended conclusion—reflects the connection between eternity and temporality experienced in a religious vocation. Drawing upon the narratological theories of 20th-century philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this article argues that Brede's time-transcending structure creates a realistic and captivating narrative that invites readers to engage in the action of the novel as its story of Christian vocation unfolds.

(1907–98), novelist and children's writer, born in Sussex. She spent her childhood in India, coming to England

Rumer Godden1 The house in British writer Rumer Godden's 1945 novel, Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, using the present tense throughout to indicate past time, does much of the talking, or so it seems, just as Thomas Wolfe's \"Dixieland\" does much of the talking to those who visit its real-life model. [...] nothing came of whatever was on the woman's mind about me. Discussed table arrangement while used as a boarding house, room where Ben died, various relatives, her wedding picture in which Tom participated as a 16-year old, etc.

In a career that began in 1935, Ms. Godden published some 70 novels, children's books, memoirs, biographies and collections of poetry and stories, many set in India, where she spent her childhood and had her first success as a writer. She also had the experience, rare for most authors, of seeing two of her most widely admired novels, ''Black Narcissus'' and ''The River,'' turned into films that became classics. Ms. Godden's third novel, ''Black Narcissus'' (1939), first brought her critical attention and commercial success. It told the story of nuns in the order of the Servants of Mary who try to overcome psychological and physical challenges to establish a hospital and school on a remote, windswept Himalaya mountain. ''Black Narcissus'' was also the first of Ms. Godden's novels to be brought to the screen, in a memorable 1946 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that starred Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Sabu, Jean Simmons and Flora Robson. Five years later Jean Renoir, the French director, made ''The River,'' recognized as one of the great color films, an adaptation of Ms. Godden's novel about English children growing up in Bengal. Ms. Godden adapted her novel with Renoir and said that she learned invaluable lessons from him.

\"Europeans in India are like cut flowers; that is why most of them wither and grow sterile,\" writes [Rumer Godden], and [Louise] is a case in point, seeing nothing but \"filth and squalor and misery\" in the bazaar and struggling with \"oppressive\", long, empty days. Her reunion with [Charles Pool] is similarly stifling as once again she finds herself trapped in their miserable marriage.