Elizabeth Goudge’s “The Little White Horse” Revisited: I Was Wrong

Having reread “The Little White Horse,” I can say with confidence that I was a nincompoop for not appreciating it more the first go-round. What inspired the family’s return to this Elizabeth Goudge book (apparently less than two years after reading it the first time) was one child’s fervent proclamation that “The Little White Horse” was her favorite book. It was also, apparently, JK Rowling’s favorite book in childhood (It’s lovely that Rowling liked it as a child but it could move one to tears thinking about how Rowling failed to draw linguistic inspiration from her supposedly favorite book. “Harry Potter” is a fun and frolicsome adventure; well written it is not!).

But back to the main point: why is “The Little White Horse” such a tremendous book? Goudge immerses the reader in a fairytale infused with just enough common, everyday details to make you feel as though you can relate to the protagonist and that your world is not too far removed from hers. In this fairy story, there are mysterious, fantastical elements at every turn. No explanation is ever required. Just like the old folktales in which a bumbling fellow stumbles into a grand quest and becomes royalty along the way, so Maria Merryweather goes from orphanhood and impending penury to heir apparent, rescuing a kingdom and restoring order where others failed.

I once spent some time with Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and have ever since been amused by the theme of the hobby horse. Each character is constrained and his perspective is filtered through his topic of fascination. Like anything successfully funny, there is some truth to it. At the time of first reading “The Little White Horse,” I was preoccupied with my own hobby horse and was totally unreceptive to a new experience. I was interested in the role of children in society and enjoyed the comical realism of one of Goudge’s other novels, “The Linnets and Valerians.”

But Maria is not a child. In the story Moonacre Manor, Maria is the Moon Maiden. While astonishing, it seems that even with the name Moon Maiden and repeated and heavy-handed use of the analogy of “moon Merryweathers” and “sun Merryweathers,” I managed to miss the fact that Goudge has brilliantly applied the archetype of women as creatures of the moon and men as beings of the sun.

There is tremendous sadness in the kingdom that Maria walks into. The individual characters are happy in their own right, many of them upstanding and virtuous. Yet, all are isolated in ways they do not wish to be and lack the ability to overcome their separation from other people, in most cases, people of the opposite sex. Maria acquires the role of an adult, forming a marriage relationship on which the happiness and harmony of all the other characters rely. While that seems a weighty and unfair responsibility, it is unquestioned in the story. The price of Maria’s beauty and talents is that she must put them at the service of her kingdom—and master her quarrelsome and questioning tendencies.

In an era of “girls’ girls” circling the wagons and proclaiming “men are trash,” men in the “manosphere” insulate themselves from true intimacy and reduce all relationships to power. The dynamism of marriage is destroyed when men and women are siloed. We tend to assume that the oppressive past that didn’t let women into Harvard was the place in which men and women were separated. But it turns out that the current moment in which co-ed dormitories have men and women sharing bathrooms means that men and women are physically present to each other while culturally and spiritually drifting further apart, failing to understand each other because they’ve been given the mistaken idea that they are the same.

Goudge’s “The Little White Horse” is many things at once: A fun story that will inspire a child to proclaim her fervent appreciation; a modern fairytale weaving together a more contemporary setting with the strangeness and wonder of fairy land; an allegory for divorce, how men and women become estranged, how the young suffer from the failures of their parents and, at the same time, face similar temptations and character flaws to those who came before them.

Any way you look at it, “The Little White Horse” is a story of great hope. This is one to add confidently to the Permanent Collection and revisit every other year. You will not be disappointed (and if you are disappointed, you’re a nincompoop).