The Idyll
August 16th, 2021 by G.
I read a book recently called a Month in the Country. It’s billed as an idyll. It isn’t, but it has parts that are. Moments of peace, as the sun rises, seen from the belfry of a country church.
I think that writing an idyll is one of the most difficult tasks a writer can have.
The high-school book A Separate Peace is not an idyll, but it has its moments. Those are what give the book its power.
The Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are idylls in homespun.
Put your recommendations below.
bruce g charlton
August 16, 2021
Leaving aside childrens’ books – I find Salinger’s novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Zooey to partake of the quality of idyll. There is much to delight and somehow we know that all will come right in the end.
Eric
August 16, 2021
One that comes to mind is The Good Master by Kate Seredy. The sequel The Singing Tree not so much, with its World War I setting, though that one won the Newberry.
tvtropes
August 16, 2021
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByNewberyMedal
Vader
August 16, 2021
Moby-dick is decidedly not an idyll. And yet, the chapter where Ishmael admires the pod of whales deep below the ocean surface seemed idyllic to me when I read it.
Eric
August 16, 2021
In The Singing Tree’s defense, it doesn’t play that trope. The main protagonist’s coming of age moment occurs when his dad goes to war, not when someone dies. I suspect its Newberry came from its rather overt appeals for peace just as World War II was starting in real life.
E.C.
August 16, 2021
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Little Women.
Anne of Green Gables (the whole series, of which there are . . . nine? Plus collected short stories)
Also L.M. Montgomery’s Emily series and The Blue Castle. She was good at idylls. You could even say she specialized in them.
Caddie Woodlawn.
The Land of the Blue Flowers (Frances Hodgson Burnett, illustrated by Judith Ann Griffith – a beautiful idyllic fairy tale, one of the few stories I know of where nothing worse happens than a brief fit of anger).
Tom Sawyer/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Wind in the Willows.
Robin McKinley’s The Door in the Hedge – a short story collection of idyllic fairy tales.
John Cleese
August 16, 2021
Eric, I see what you did there.
G.
August 16, 2021
Wonderful
Dang
August 16, 2021
The Bat Poet – Randall Jarrell
gst
August 23, 2021
I second your recommendation of A Month in the Country. Really great.
In this category I would also include The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, and recommend it to you.
Evenstar
August 25, 2021
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
Marilyn
August 26, 2021
At Home in Mitford series by Jan Karon.
I second “Swallows and Amazons.”
Marilyn
August 27, 2021
Oh! And “Understood Betsy.” And all the Betsy-Tacy books. And Millie-Molly-Mandy!