Northern France is evocative of so many authors that I love including Gustave Flaubert, Francois Mauriac and Rumer Godden. These are all classic novelists, but there is one other novelist who writes beautifully and memorably about Normandy and Brittany, and she is Jane Shaw.
Jane Shaw is a children’s author, famous for her Susan and Penny books, amongst many others. She writes so evocatively about French architecture and the countryside. Many of her novels are set in and around St Malo. I fell in love with these places long before I visited them.
Her novels set in Paris including Looking After Thomas and Anything Can Happen made me long for citron pressé and a trip on a bateau mouche, as well as exploring Norte Dame and the Rive Gauche. But, on holiday in Normandy, it was Shaw’s descriptions of chateaux, houses and the countryside which were most evocative.
In Breton Holiday Sara and Caroline arrive at the chateau and note that “the house …was high, with pointed eaves, dazzling white in the sunlight, the windows flanked with green shutters”. In Susan’s Kind Heart, Shaw writes “Midge and Susan….were looking at the scenery which was gentle and enclosed with stunted, queerly-shaped trees and carved stone Calvaries at the cross-roads”. Finally, they arrive at the chateau: “It really is a chateau! But it wasn’t a real, big, grand chateau, only a dear little miniature one, with grey stone walls and pepper-pot towers”.
Finally, in Twopence Coloured there are wonderful descriptions of the French countryside and small towns, including Dinan - “the small, shut-in fields and orchards, the tall houses guarded behind high-railings and big gates, their windows shuttered and hidden. They passed through….Dinan…Louise caught glimpses of ancient houses and narrow streets.”
