Lucy Lethbridge revisits Black Narcissus as the BBC unveils its flagship Christmas miniseries

Rumer Godden published her novel Black Narcissus – the subject of a major new BBC miniseries – in 1939. The Raj, under which she had grown up, was then in its last years. But rural India was the landscape of Godden’s childhood and she returned to it obsessively in her novels, casting it as a sensual but threatening Eden. In her autobiographical novel The River, she even graphically depicted an all-too-real snake in the paradise world of a small child.

Godden was absorbed by the opposites represented not only by the empire and its subjects but by pragmatism and imagination, the spiritual and the material, order and licentiousness, seduction and asceticism. She was fascinated by religion, and later Catholicism, all her life; she finally entered the Church in 1968, a year before the publication of In This House of Brede, her novel about an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns based on Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire.

Black Narcissus – the novel’s title does not, as I’d imagined, refer to some rare bloom only to be found on the flanks of Mount Kanchenjunga, but to a popular 1930s brand of scent ordered from the British Home Stores catalogue – is a high-octane story of clashing cultures and misunderstandings centred on a community of nuns in the Himalayas.