A House With Four Rooms

Another treasure from the Melbourne Athenaeum Library -- I didn't even know that this book existed. And isn't this first edition pretty! The title is explained at the very end of the book:

Like everyone else I am a house with four rooms. As a child the physical room was barred to me, I had to fight my way to get into it. The room of the mind has always been mine. In the emotional, I have been marvellously lucky; with the spiritual, it was a long time before I would do more than peer in; now it is where I like best to be alone.

All of us tend to inhabit one room more than another but I have tried to go most days into them all -- each has its riches.

My house is, of course, slightly worn now but I still hope to go on quietly living in all of it, finding treasures, old and new until the time comes when I shall have, finally, to shut its door.

Isn't that absolutely beautiful? What a wonderful way to imagine the balance of life. Rumer Godden lived a full and rich and long life (she died in 1998), somehow managing to write dozens of books in between growing up in India, a failed marriage that led to a spartan life in a hut in the Himalayas, raising two daughters, numerous house moves, illness and tragedy (one house burned down and they lost almost everything), speaking tours of the US, several of her novels being turned into films, and other adventures...

Some of the personages she mentions in A House With Four Rooms are not known to me, others I have heard of. I looked up Stanbrook Abbey, the inspiration for perhaps my favourite Godden novel, In This House of Brede, and saw that it's become a hotel -- due to declining numbers, the abbey's sisters relocated to Yorkshire. It sounds (according to Wikipedia) as if the move was painful; three sisters left the abbey and set up their own establishment. It would have made a perfect, agonising plot for another novel.