- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd; New edition edition (20 May 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 034058811X
- ISBN-13: 978-0340588116
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 10 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 785,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Set in Elizabethan times, Faithful, a poor Londoner, heads for Oxford. He's bright, cheeky and good-looking, has a tremendous love of learning and hopes to be an Oxford scholar. When he is taken in by Canon Leigh and his family, he begins to fulfil his dreams. By the author of "Gential Hill".
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Towers in the Mist is a fairytale romance, set against a glittering backdrop of Oxford on the eve of Elizabeth I's royal tour. The novel centres around delightful tale of impoverished Faithful, who embarks on a pilgrimage to Oxford in pursuit of learning. Faithful is adopted by the Leigh family, a lively brood who absorb the young scholar and thus the reader into their joys and sorrows, with enthusiastic charm. The reader is drawn into a dreamy world of wit and scholarship, budding romance and fairytale adventures. Elizabeth Goudge colours Elizabethan Oxford with the tinge of fairytale delight that is her speciality. In her work historical characters such as Walter Raleigh, leap from the page brimming with life and charm. Her heroes and heroines are human and flawed, but possessed of an enchanted quality and grace that compel the imagination. The reader is swept away with stories of fairy circles, changelings and holy wells, while identifying fully with the painful sensitivity of first love. This book mirrors Oxford through the golden light of fairy tale. It's the Little White Horse for grown ups.
Format:Paperback
Goudge in Oxford with Queen Elizabeth I
Elizabeth Goudge's ability to handle a more distant historical setting can be seen in Towers in the Mist, originally published for adults, but much later reissued as a Peacock paperback for "young adults". Indeed it is an anybody book.
Set in Oxford during the early years of Queen Elizabeth the First, in Sixteenth century England, during a peaceful interlude in the conflict between Catholic and Protestant that tore "Merrie" England apart, Towers in the Mist is a double love story in the days when thirteen was a marriageable age!
The story centres around widowed Canon Gervase Leigh of Christ College and his children and his eighty-five year old aunt, a gifted fourteen year old orphan Faithful Crocker, and undergraduate students, including Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney and Edmund Campion among other actual historical figures.
Goudge's attention to detail vividly captures the time, when people lived in dark smoky ill-heated houses without plumbing or drainage, children drank home-brewed beer to avoid the risk of infected water, and the good queen, Young Bess, was infatuated with the Earl of Leicester, who is Chancellor of Oxford university and uncle of Philip Sidney (a tragic, heroic, and poetic figure of the era).
The community of that time measures its day through church activity, rich with observance and festival.
Earlier beliefs of May Revels and gods of the greenwood are just nostalgic memories.
Christianity provides a natural point of view for everything that happens, but this does not make the book unquestioningly pious.
It is often very funny.
For example, Canon Leigh's oldest daughter is very impressed by the apparently prayerful demeanour of her young admirer. But he is actually mentally doing his accounts to see how badly he has overspent his allowance.
One key climax in the book occurs on Christmas Eve at a murderous fight immediately after a rustic enactment of a nativity play, when spectators yell like animals to the fighters, lanterns are held high to see the violence better - and the stars look down silently.
Death and nativity juxtapose powerfully.
As in so much of her work, Goudge creates a complex picture, like a vast Breugellian Old Master, full of tiny detail and incident, richly observed, achieving happy endings (often predictable, but HOW will they happen?), but paying the price of heartache and sacrifice.
Highly recommended.
John Gough -- Deakin University - [...]
Elizabeth Goudge's ability to handle a more distant historical setting can be seen in Towers in the Mist, originally published for adults, but much later reissued as a Peacock paperback for "young adults". Indeed it is an anybody book.
Set in Oxford during the early years of Queen Elizabeth the First, in Sixteenth century England, during a peaceful interlude in the conflict between Catholic and Protestant that tore "Merrie" England apart, Towers in the Mist is a double love story in the days when thirteen was a marriageable age!
The story centres around widowed Canon Gervase Leigh of Christ College and his children and his eighty-five year old aunt, a gifted fourteen year old orphan Faithful Crocker, and undergraduate students, including Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney and Edmund Campion among other actual historical figures.
Goudge's attention to detail vividly captures the time, when people lived in dark smoky ill-heated houses without plumbing or drainage, children drank home-brewed beer to avoid the risk of infected water, and the good queen, Young Bess, was infatuated with the Earl of Leicester, who is Chancellor of Oxford university and uncle of Philip Sidney (a tragic, heroic, and poetic figure of the era).
The community of that time measures its day through church activity, rich with observance and festival.
Earlier beliefs of May Revels and gods of the greenwood are just nostalgic memories.
Christianity provides a natural point of view for everything that happens, but this does not make the book unquestioningly pious.
It is often very funny.
For example, Canon Leigh's oldest daughter is very impressed by the apparently prayerful demeanour of her young admirer. But he is actually mentally doing his accounts to see how badly he has overspent his allowance.
One key climax in the book occurs on Christmas Eve at a murderous fight immediately after a rustic enactment of a nativity play, when spectators yell like animals to the fighters, lanterns are held high to see the violence better - and the stars look down silently.
Death and nativity juxtapose powerfully.
As in so much of her work, Goudge creates a complex picture, like a vast Breugellian Old Master, full of tiny detail and incident, richly observed, achieving happy endings (often predictable, but HOW will they happen?), but paying the price of heartache and sacrifice.
Highly recommended.
John Gough -- Deakin University - [...]
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Another masterpiece
12 Mar 2003
Format:Hardcover
Unsurprisingly enough, Elizabeth Goudge has done it again. This is a beautiful story of love in its many forms. Goudge does not so much bring her characters to life as present us with living beings with whom to acquaint ourselves. And her descriptions of the physical world are, as always, unsurpassable. Read this book, and get your hands on everything else she ever wrote.
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