The serpent in the garden

Loss of innocence happens to us all and is one of the great themes of literature. With The River, a novella first published in 1946 and now rightly republished by Virago, Rumer Godden gave us not only her best book (she wrote more than 60) but a small masterpiece, a near perfect account of how childhood has to come to an end and the serpent must enter the garden.

Her story of an English family living on a river in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) is closely based on her own early life. Born in 1907, she grew up, the second of four sisters, in a large house at Narayanganj, near Dhaka, where her father worked for the Inland Navigation Company; like so many children of the Raj, she had been sent back to Britain to be educated only to be reprieved, as she always saw it, when the first world war began and her parents feared years of separation.