"Green Dolphin Street": Novel or Movie?

Hendrickson Publishers has re-issued a nice uniform set of several of Elizabeth Goudge's novels. One "uniform" aspect of these re-printings is that the publishers have seen fit to highlight some possibly controversial aspect of Goudge's works to warn sensitive readers. In The White Witch they warned me that I might not like how Goudge depicts Romany people; in Green Dolphin Street they warned me that I might not like how Goudge depicts the Maori people in New Zealand and that colonial attitudes may not be enlightened enough for 21st century readers! The publishers even suggest that they considered bowdlerizing Goudge's work but decided that readers can handle it after all.

I wonder what trigger warnings Hendrickson adds to their different editions of the Holy Bible!

Nevertheless, it's good to have these books in print. Green Dolphin Street or Green Dolphin Country, as it was published in the U.K., was the basis of the 1947 MGM movie with Lana Turner as Marianne, Donna Reed as Marguerite, and Richard Hart as the man in the middle of the two sisters, William Ozanne.

I've watched the movie several times--and wrote about it for The St. Austin Review (subscriber access required)--and now I've read the novel, so the most common question is: which is better, the novel or the movie?

The answer in this case is: both.

The movie is excellent as a film; it maintains the outline of the plot, condenses the action in time, and heightens some of the dramatic tension.

The novel is excellent as a work of fiction: Goudge signals early on the crucial issue of the plot (that William Ozanne gets names, including Marianne's and Marguerite's, mixed up all the time); she creates an interior life for each of her characters, and she spreads the action of these three lives, and the other people around them, over a longer period of time--about forty years. The three main characters are in their sixties when they reunite. The final resolution of the plot, for example, comes not just before Marguerite makes her final vows (as in the movie) but years after she has become the Mother Superior at the convent in their hometown (after several years in a French convent).

The movie leaves out one set of supporting characters, Samuel and Susanna, Christian missionaries to New Zealand who befriend William and Marianne Ozanne. Nat, Captain O'Hara's first mate, isn't featured in the movie either.

Although the novel's omniscient narration is divided almost equally among the three main characters, it is Marianne who faces the greatest crisis and must develop more as a person. William and Marguerite have genuinely loving and open personalities; Marianne is a controlling and manipulative person who needs to learn that she is not in control. Her attempted manipulation of people and events almost led to her daughter making a terrible marital mistake, for example. Goudge notes Marianne's progress in humility by noting that she finally accepts that she really can't make her parents' home totally her own. She accepts that some things should be left to reflect the influence of the past.

Highly recommended.