REVIEW: The Woods of Windri
The Woods of Windri: Violet Needham, Collins, 1958.
This story starts off in what seems like a simple way, but sowing the seeds of a political conspiracy and adventure. I felt it started slowly, as we’re introduced to Lord of Windri, his family and some of the background. He is trying to make up his mind over a request for his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage from an unexpected source. The setting of the story is medieval, but in a hybrid Ruritania, with British touches - a reference to Morris dances and marches, but from the geography the setting is Continental and there are references to the Pope and real monastic orders. Windri is part of an Empire, while to the South lies Monte Lucio. There’s also a mystical element to the story, chiefly to do with the Woods of the title, wich I suppose are meant to echo Nottingham, Macbeth’s Birnam Woods and the Great Forest of the European imagination or folk memory.
I did wonder what child readers made of this story.
Lord Brian has two surviving daughters, the eldest and dearest is Phillippa, who is of an age to be married, but the offer to wed her has come from the count of a territory the Lord of Windri has cause to be dubious about. Plus he’s reluctant to give up his daughter, having lost his wife and two sons. Phillippa is all the burgeoning lady of a courtly romance should be, if a little dull until a moral crisis. Fortunately the story features much more of her younger sister Magdalen, who is more interested in animals than sewing.
The sisters meet a man and a boy, respectively, while wandering the Woods, and they will change everything. One is gallant, the second mysterious. Magdalen gets her father to take on young waif Theodore as his page, but this means bringing in political affairs that Windri would otherwise have been well out of.
The story gradually unfolds - Phillippa’s suitor is not what he seems, there are ambitious, plotting monks contrasted by hermits with secrets who prove that it’s no good abiding by the letter, while breaking the spirit.
Theodore is a singular boy and the real hero, who has escaped an abusive childhood, believing himself nameless and determined to make a name for himself because of it. Like Magdalen, Lord Brian recognises something in him (he’s like the Stormy Petrel in the age for chivalry, not the twentieth century).
There are more layers to this book than your average children’s adventure - the fact that it’s a Ruritanian setting but the medieval period has a strange affect. I liked that although the nameless acquires a name, the orphaned gains a family and so forth, the pivotal stuggle is about his fighting against hatred.
Magdalen, both petted and patronised, and very much circumscribed by what was expected of girls in her day, is likeable as is the more complicated Theodore. Needham is good on the credible physical impact of tension and exhaustion on all of her characters.
This entry was originally posted at http://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/126629.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
This story starts off in what seems like a simple way, but sowing the seeds of a political conspiracy and adventure. I felt it started slowly, as we’re introduced to Lord of Windri, his family and some of the background. He is trying to make up his mind over a request for his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage from an unexpected source. The setting of the story is medieval, but in a hybrid Ruritania, with British touches - a reference to Morris dances and marches, but from the geography the setting is Continental and there are references to the Pope and real monastic orders. Windri is part of an Empire, while to the South lies Monte Lucio. There’s also a mystical element to the story, chiefly to do with the Woods of the title, wich I suppose are meant to echo Nottingham, Macbeth’s Birnam Woods and the Great Forest of the European imagination or folk memory.
I did wonder what child readers made of this story.
Lord Brian has two surviving daughters, the eldest and dearest is Phillippa, who is of an age to be married, but the offer to wed her has come from the count of a territory the Lord of Windri has cause to be dubious about. Plus he’s reluctant to give up his daughter, having lost his wife and two sons. Phillippa is all the burgeoning lady of a courtly romance should be, if a little dull until a moral crisis. Fortunately the story features much more of her younger sister Magdalen, who is more interested in animals than sewing.
The sisters meet a man and a boy, respectively, while wandering the Woods, and they will change everything. One is gallant, the second mysterious. Magdalen gets her father to take on young waif Theodore as his page, but this means bringing in political affairs that Windri would otherwise have been well out of.
The story gradually unfolds - Phillippa’s suitor is not what he seems, there are ambitious, plotting monks contrasted by hermits with secrets who prove that it’s no good abiding by the letter, while breaking the spirit.
Theodore is a singular boy and the real hero, who has escaped an abusive childhood, believing himself nameless and determined to make a name for himself because of it. Like Magdalen, Lord Brian recognises something in him (he’s like the Stormy Petrel in the age for chivalry, not the twentieth century).
There are more layers to this book than your average children’s adventure - the fact that it’s a Ruritanian setting but the medieval period has a strange affect. I liked that although the nameless acquires a name, the orphaned gains a family and so forth, the pivotal stuggle is about his fighting against hatred.
Magdalen, both petted and patronised, and very much circumscribed by what was expected of girls in her day, is likeable as is the more complicated Theodore. Needham is good on the credible physical impact of tension and exhaustion on all of her characters.
This entry was originally posted at http://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/126629.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.