"My favorite book as a child was The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge," said J.K. Rowling.  The Little White Horse is considered to be an outstanding book for children and was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1946.  The author also wrote The Cathedral Trilogy, The Eliot Trilogy, Gentian Hill, Green Dolphin Country and other works.

Elizabeth Goudge writes stories which have a special appeal - you could say a special magic.  Linnets and Valerians have wonderful spells, magic gates, coincidences and more.  Goudge's writing inspires the imagination.

The author also writes for adults and in those works she is more serious, sophisticated, and detailed.  Her characters are real and the scenes are well written.

Here is a brief bibliography of her work:

Elizabeth Goudge is an eloquent writer who charms the English language into the reader's life.  Here is a small sample from The White Witch:

"Whenever she returned to it Froniga found fresh delight in her home. When she got up on fine mornings she would find her window covered with frost flowers, behind them the fires of the rising sun. She could not see the sun, she could only see the flame that seemed sparkling and crackling just behind her window, and she would stretch out her arms and laugh with joy. The fire on her hearth had never seemed to burn so merrily. The apple logs had blue and yellow flames, the cherry logs smelt like flowers and the burning fir cones were edged with the same color that had sparkled behind the frost flowers on her window. She would kneel before the hearth, warming her hands and singing, and Pen her white cat would weave round and round her purring and vibrating. But Pen was not so white as the snowflakes that fell outside her window, sometimes singly, like the feathers of a white swan that had passed overhead, sometimes in dense masses of falling light. Her room too was then so full of light that the flames on the hearth paled and did not come into their own again until dark came and she drew the curtains, and sat with her spinning wheel before the fire."

Elizabeth Goudge was born at Wells, Somerset, the daughter of Dr. Henry Leighton Goudge, an Anglican priest and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. Elizabeth was educated at boarding school and at Reading University, after which she taught art and design. Her play The Brontës of Haworth (1932) succeeded in London, but after the failure of a second play, a publisher suggested that she turn to novels. Her first was Island Magic (1934), about Guernsey, where her mother's family lived.

Goudge's first major success in both Britain and the United States was Green Dolphin Country (1944), a historical novel set in 19th-century New Zealand and in the Channel Islands, which won a Literary Guild Award and was filmed in 1947. Other major novels include Gentian Hill (1949) and The Child from the Sea (1970), which told the story of King Charles II's supposed secret wife, Lucy Walter. Goudge also wrote a family trilogy, comprising The Bird in the Tree (1940), The Herb of Grace (1948), and The Heart of the Family (1953). Her books for children include Smoky-House (1940), a story of smugglers; The Little White Horse (1946), which won a Carnegie Medal in 1947; and Linnets and Valerians (1964).

From 1950 most of Goudge's books were religious, including a biography of Christ entitled For God So Loved the World (1951), St. Francis of Assisi (1959), and three anthologies of spiritually comforting verse, the last of which was A Book of Faith (1976). Her autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, appeared in 1974.