intertext

Sorry! I'm such a bad blogger these days. I only just saw your comment. In the interview with Judith Ridge, Judith asks her if she intended that garden to have connections with the sacred, and she says "I'm turning into C.S. Lewis!" but that she did go to a "deeper place" when she wrote that passage. I'm finding that consciously or unconsciously, DWJ is drawing from a "cauldron of story" - she's steeped in all kinds of literature, and had been reading the Narnia books out loud to her children. Also, her husband is a medievalist. And she'd obviously read Spencer. So there's all these influences percolating under the surface. Writing of Eight Days of Luke, she said that she used mythology to evoke a feeling of "the awesome" that was accessible even today. I think much the same thing is going on here.