NOVEL TO BE FILMED

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 59, 7 September 1945, Page 10

NOVEL TO BE FILMED

"GREEN DOLPHIN COUNTRY"

Elizabeth Goudge hardly ever goes to the movies, yet she expects to make at least 125,000 dollars from a single film based on her best-selling novel. "Green Dolphin Country," writes a Canadian correspondent. The daughter of a canon whose bounty far outran his income, she lives quietly, almost shyly, with her mother in Devonshire. She receives many visitors these days, more than ever before, and among them are numerous servicemen. Money that would represent a fortune to most people is hers now, but her head is so far from being turned that the measure of her desires is to see a little of the world that she knows chiefly through other eyes, and to fit out a special work-study which "I can have all to myself." Miss Goudge at 18 wrote her first book, a story -for children called "The Fairy's Baby." "Green Dolphin Country" was her thirteenth book. Sitting amid chintz and dresden, the tallish, spare-of -figure, 45-year-old Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge returned again and again to the theme, "I can't realise yet that all this is really true!" She meant, of course, the way a book guild in the United States acclaimed "Green Dolphin Country," as the book of the year in 1944, and her winning of the Louis B. Mayer prize of some 120,000 dollars. "It's odd, though." she said. "I never thought of writing for the films. I know so little about them, and practically never go to them. Still, I imagine that there are many scenes in the book that will film well." From her mother, a Channel Islander, Elizabeth Goudge, as a child, learned the knack of telling stories, the old fables and folklore of Guernsey. Forty years later she has been able to make good use of that skill and of that knowledge. The story of "Green Dolphin Country" is set first in the Channel Islands in the middle of the last century, shifts to New Zea-. land, and then is brought back to the. islands. "My daughter has been getting a lot of attention lately," the mother said, "and I'm not saying that it isn't deserved. I am delighted that she has been so successful as a writer, but what I'm most proud of is that Elizabeth is a good coo"k, a really good cook." In April, 1939, Miss Goudge's father died. For 16 years he had been canon of Christ Church in Oxford. Constant generosity had drained the family's resources and mother and daughter no longer could afford to live in Oxford. Therefore, in September of that year, while the war was starting, these two went to tiny Westerland, where they built a small wooden bungalow and called it Providence Cottage. Four hours a dayl Miss Goudge works at a little desk in her bedroom in a rather cramped space for a writer needing plenty of elbow room. She hopes that soon it will be replaced by a study of her own.