She moved to Moniaive in Dumfriesshire in 1978, when she was 70, to be near her daughter Jane. In 1968 she took the tenancy of Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, where she lived until the death of her husband in 1973. She won a 1972 Whitbread award for The Diddakoi, a young adult novel about Gypsies, televised by the BBC as Kizzy. Her plots often involve unusual young people not recognised for their talents by ordinary lower- or middle-class people but supported by the educated, rich, and upper-class, to the anger, resentment, and puzzlement of their relatives. Her books for children, especially her several doll stories, strongly convey the secret thoughts, confusions, disappointments and aspirations of childhood. In Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy and In This House of Brede she acutely examined the balance between the mystical, spiritual aspects of religion and the practical, human realities of religious life.Ī number of Godden's novels are set in India, the atmosphere of which she evokes through all the senses her writing is vivid with detail of smells, textures, light, flowers, noises and tactile experiences.

In addition to Black Narcissus, two of her books deal with the subject of women in religious communities. In the early 1950s Godden became interested in the Catholic Church, though she did not officially convert until 1968, and several of her later novels contain sympathetic portrayals of Catholic priests and nuns.

After returning from America to oversee the script for the movie of her book The River, Godden married civil servant James Haynes Dixon on 26 November 1949. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1945 to concentrate on her writing, frequently moving house but living mostly in Sussex and London. After a mysterious incident in which it appeared that an attempt had been made to poison both her and her daughters, she returned to Calcutta in 1944. The novel Kingfishers Catch Fire was based on her time in Kashmir.

In 1942, after eight years in an unhappy marriage (one she entered into in 1934 because she was pregnant), she moved with her two daughters, Jane and Paula, (her husband Laurence Foster having joined the army) to Kashmir, living first on a houseboat and then in a rented house where she started a farm.

The Greengage Summer (1958), 1962 Pan paperback edition

In this house of brede by rumer godden