June 1961
China Court is a house built in 1840 in Cornwall by a family called Quin who own the local china clay quarries, and the novel encompasses five generations of the Quins centred upon this place. At the opening old Mrs. Quin has just died, but as she was eighty-one and had lived all her life in the village before she married, she was in touch all the way through the house’s family, from her husband’s grandfather to her own granddaughter, Tracy, whose childhood is spent with her. Through Mrs. Quin, Tracy learns to inherit memory and experience of all the people who have made and used and accumulated the house that they both love: and as the mind may radiate with random ease from its present to any moment of its past, and one is so contained in the other, the novel is not told either chronologically or in ‘flash-backs’, but presented without time in its usual sense of straight lines and distance. The effect is something like the difference between hovering low over a forest, instead of walking through it; the impression of the whole serves to heighten experience of the parts. All very well - possibly all very confusing - but the secret of the surprising and delighting clarity here is that Miss Godden’s sequences - although easy, are not random - have been selected with all the imaginative and feeling skill which is instinct in her work.
In a short preface she begs one to remember that when one first meets a large family, it takes time to distinguish them, asks for our patience and assures us that we shall not need the family tree at the back of the book. She is quite right, of course; the minimum of patience is needed and the tree is unnecessary: her people, met at different and not always the earliest moments of their varying lives, from the opening pages are sharply distinct, warmly alive, having those layers of flavour about them of being a family and of their particular periods in its history underlying their separate natures. It is a romantic novel, which I am well aware has become a dangerous thing to say, but I do not mean the true-love-in-a-wig-winning-through-to-sex-in spite-of-the-French-Revolution formula which has sneaked this appellation: I mean that it is a very good novel of the kind where the relationships of people to one another are taken to be of paramount importance.