The meandering of the mind forward and backward in time and space characterizes all of Rumer Godden's novels. In A Candle for St. Jude, it is the mind of Madame Anna Holbein, weaving back and forth from her Russian beginnings as a child dancer, to her fame as a prima ballerina, to her old age, teaching younger dancers about her art and the art of living. Although the entire novel takes place in a space of a few days, the workings of Madame's mind show us more than fifty years of dance, love, triumph and sorrow.

In this excerpt, Madame has gone to lie down before her students' gala performance, a gala that seems doomed to failure.

Rest was not long, any more than love, for her. She was restless. Now she was the Hummingbird, dancing instead of [the child dancer] that night. She was small and she was breaking in her own small shoe in the hot theatre wings. She saw the pan of rosin, her toes were firm, padded, in the shoe, and she worked it and felt the stiffness leaving it. She bent to lace the ribbons; she felt the unaccustomed pull of her tights at the back as she bent forward and the coloured ends of the feathered wings swung from her arms; she was breaking in her shoe and the shoes were under the glass dome like two soiled pink sugar mice. Now she was grown and it was long gauze skirts that fell away from her as she moved, gauze skirts and grave-eyed marguerites, and now she had a little gilt trumpet, and round rouged spots on her cheek; the Queen's hand in the white glove was held out for her to kiss, and the black tutu of Odile tilted round her as she curtsied. Perhaps I am going to die, said Madame. Perhaps at last they have killed me. She felt sorry for herself. I have never fainted before, and, in the last few minutes before you die, the past comes back to you, not? But that happens oll the time, said Madame. Time passes, but that it what it doesn't do. Past, present, and future. Her past and her present, her future if she were not going to die, were all dancing. . .