Foreword

Through the years this series has been in print, lots of people have reviewed the stories. Opinions often divide over the structure of the first two novels, to the extent that I thought an explanatory note might be helpful.

The first book in the series, The Hawk and the Dove, is written not so much as a consecutive narrative but as a series of short stories about a medieval monastery, contained within a modern setting in which a mother tells the stories to her daughter.

This structure and the somewhat naïve style of the book came about not through mere whimsy, but as a tribute to two particular medieval texts – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Fioretti of St Francis of Assisi.

The Canterbury Tales employs the literary conceit of the frame tale, and the Fioretti gathers together a sequence of short stories (not fictional) recording the early days of the Franciscan movement from which the Order began.

In writing The Hawk and the Dove, intrigued by the style and structure of these medieval texts, I constructed my novel similarly. It also offered the possibility of balancing two worlds – the medieval and the modern, the monastic and the secular, the feminine and the masculine. The second book, The Wounds of God, I crafted along the same model. In subsequent volumes in the series I wanted to tackle issues that did not lend themselves to this structure, so I set it aside for The Long Fall and the books that followed.

Now, twenty-five years after the first book was published, as the series returns (in this new edition) from its long and happy stay in the United States to England where it began, I wondered whether to re-write the first two books, re-crafting them into the simple narrative style of the later volumes in the series.

I decided not to, in the end. Partly because many mothers have enjoyed the family stories, partly because many readers whose lives are harassed and busy have been glad of a novel that divides easily into short sections that can be read in a lunch break or as a bedtime story. Also because I do love St Francis, and Chaucer and the whole medieval world, and wanted to keep my little tribute to them. And because I still have an affection for The Hawk and the Dove, the first book I ever wrote. I think it has something that speaks of the simplicity of Jesus.

 

Penelope Wilcock
February 2015