Margaret Rumer Godden was born Dec. 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. She was nine months old when her family moved to India, where her father ran a shipping line. Her works are a powerful blending of the cool English blood in her veins and the hot India sun under which she lived for so many years.

"Our house was streaked with Indian or Indian streaked with English," Godden wrote in "Two Under the Indian Sun," a memoir co-authored with her sister Jon Godden in 1966.

She returned to London at age 20 to learn how to teach dance to children, and opened a school back in India. She fell in love with a stockbroker, Laurence Sinclair Foster, became pregnant and married him. Returning to England while she was pregnant, she wrote her first book, "Chinese Puzzle," published in 1936. The baby died at birth, but the ill-suited couple later had two daughters. The marriage ended in 1941, and Foster left her penniless and alone in Calcutta. "I have distrusted charm ever since," she said.

She tried to repay his debts, and moved her family into a mountain cottage where she ran a school, made herbal teas for sale, and wrote books. The family survived an apparent poisoning attempt by two servants, an episode that figured in her 1953 novel, "Kingfishers Catch Fire." Another novel of India, "The River," published in 1949, was one of her most acclaimed books and was made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1951. She returned to England to stay in 1945, and made a happy second marriage in 1949 to James Haynes-Dixon, who died in 1973.

Rumer Godden was the author of more than 60 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry, plays and non-fiction. She published her 21st novel, "Cromartie vs. the God Shiva," in 1997. Rumer Godden died November 8, 1998, in Thornhill, Scotland, at the age of 90.