12 Facts About Jon Godden

Jon Godden was the elder sister of the better-known novelist Rumer Godden.

The eldest of four daughters of Arthur Leigh Godden, an agent for a British steamer company in what is Bangladesh, and Katherine Norah Hingley, Jon Godden spent almost all of her childhood and much of her adult life in India.

Jon Godden's parents were advised by the professional who had judged the exhibition that she had a future as an artist and that they should eventually send her to The Slade in London.

Jon's abilities and good looks, as well as her position as the eldest daughter in the Godden family, meant that she exercised great emotional power over her younger siblings throughout her life and that she was always regarded within the family as the most talented sister, if not the most productive.

Jon Godden became engaged to Baughan, but he could not immediately marry, owing to the terms of his employment.

In October 1936, Jon Godden married Roland Oakley in St Paul's Cathedral, Calcutta.

Unlike her sister Rumer, whose first marriage was financially disastrous and required Rumer to work hard at her writing to support herself and her children, Jon Godden had, at least temporarily, a successful husband able and willing to support her, and she was not enthusiastic about competing in the literary world.

Jon Godden did not publish her first novel, The Bird Escaped, until 1947, and it was Rumer who persuaded her own literary agents, Curtis Brown, to handle it.

However, Jon Godden's life changed drastically when her marriage to Oakley, under strain for some years, suddenly ended.

Jon Godden moved into a cottage on the grounds of the property in Kent that her parents had purchased with Rumer's assistance and remained there until her death.

In later years, while still producing fiction, Jon Godden collaborated with Rumer on non-fiction books, including the very well received Two Under the Indian Sun and Shiva's Pigeons, for which the sisters wrote the text to accompany Stella Snead's black-and-white photographs of Indian life, culture, and landscape.

In 1984, after suffering ill-health for an extended period, Jon Godden died at the age of 78.