Fräulein Schmidt's letters

Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, Elizabeth von Arnim

I am not quite sure what to say about this book.  As I was reading it, I found my opinion of it, and feelings about it, changing constantly. Elizabeth von Arnim's stories never seem to go in the direction I expect, which can make for an unsettling reading experience.  This wasn't as difficult a book for me as The Pastor's Wife, but days later I am still looking it and thinking, "Hmmmm...."  This post is an attempt to figure out why.  There may be some mild spoilers, for those who haven't read the book.

Published in 1907, this is an epistolary novel, a genre I love.  It consists of letters written by Rose-Marie Schmidt, a young woman of twenty-five living in Jena, a small country town near Berlin.  In the first letter we learn that she has just become engaged to Roger Anstruther, a young Englishman who has been boarding with her family for the past year while studying German.  His declaration and proposal, and her acceptance, were hastily given and received, almost as he was on his way out the door, returning home to England.  Rose-Marie sends her first ecstatic love letter following after him, full of things she had no time to say.

Rose-Marie's love and hopes pour out in frequent letters to Roger, and she is constantly expecting to hear from him, calculating how long it will take letters to reach her from England.  When his begin to arrive, they quickly begin to suggest that he is having second thoughts, and that it is "out of sight, out of mind" with him.  I appreciated Elizabeth von Arnim's skill in building up a picture of Roger solely through Rose-Marie's letters.  He plays such a major part in the story without ever appearing even once, or speaking a word - and yet his character and his personality come through so clearly.  He is obviously the vacillating type, for whom the grass is always greener over the proverbial fence.  Rose-Marie, clinging to her love, trusting her beloved, doesn't see this - or perhaps refuses to.  It was painful to read her letters, knowing what coming, watching her increasing desperation at his silence.  But no sooner does Roger break the engagement, in favor of a rich and well-connected young English girl, a favorite of his father's, than he begins to pine for Rose-Marie again, and to pursue her by letter.  She, slowly recovering from heart-break, answers his letters briefly and reluctantly at first.  As she warms to writing again, she insists it is as a friend only, almost a sister.  She warns him off constantly from any expression of sentiment or emotion, but he doesn't seem to understand how serious she is.  Like Lily Dale, she will not accept love again from someone who proved unworthy of her trust.

That determination, her strength of mind, is part of what makes Rose-Marie such a wonderful heroine.  Other than a few bitter asides, she does not complain to Roger about his caddish behavior.  She simply sets about rebuilding her life.  I admired her for that (while thinking of a few things I'd like to say to Roger myself).  She is a bibliophile, and poetry becomes a solace for her.  She is bright and inquisitive, and somewhere in her small-town life she has learned to think for herself.  Endlessly curious about the world around her, she writes about her neighbors and people she meets, books she is reading, the challenges of housekeeping, what she sees on her walks in the countryside around Jena.  She philosophizes frequently (sometimes at great length) on the big questions of life: love, faith, the role of education, women's place in society.

Part of Rose-Marie's initial joy in her engagement is at the prospect of escaping from small-town provincial life, and from her step-mother Emilie, who brought necessary income but not much happiness to her new home.  Rose-Marie's father has no profession and no money of his own, other than the fees he collects for tutoring.  Known as "the Professor," he is a student of Goethe, a religious free-thinker who scandalizes his conventionally pious neighbors.  He is also a rather unworldly man, writing long books that fail to find a publisher.  The father and daughter have a warm, loving relationship, with shared interests in poetry, and shared jokes.  I can imagine that Emilie must often feel a bit left out, and Rose-Marie recognizes at one point that she has not always been kind to her step-mother, resolving to do better.  The Professor reminded me a bit of Mr. March in Little Women, with Rose-Marie something like Meg and Jo.  I think this is the happiest father-daughter relationship that I have come across in von Arnim's books.

Rose-Marie writes frequently about the beauty of the country-side around Jena, where she loves to ramble (and where she also finds solace for her heart-break).  Her letters also discuss the details of house-keeping on a small budget (including an amusing attempt to become vegetarians, even vegans).  I was fascinated to learn from the introduction to my Virago edition that Elizabeth von Arnim did some personal research for this book, in a small town like Jena, where she disguised herself as an English governess on holiday, boarding with a local family and doing housework in exchange for German lessons.  In a version of "Victor/Victoria," we have an English woman pretending to be a German woman pretending to be an English woman.  I wonder if her employers ever discovered the deception..

Writing as the German "Elizabeth," the English von Arnim frequently skewered the people of her adopted and native countries, particularly the men, in her books.  She was writing with inside knowledge of both, though few of her readers at the time would have known that.  (In fact, Rose-Marie herself is half-English, though she apparently learned little of England from her mother.)  Here Roger is presented as immature, indecisive and completely self-absorbed.  We also get Joey Collins, his successor in the Schmidt household, who is equally immature, interested only in sports.  And while on the German side we have the Professor, we also get his brother, a Berlin banker, another Man of Wrath who snubs his wife and daughters at every turn, as well as his lackadaisical brother; whose own comfort must come before everything else.  And through Rose-Marie's letters von Arnim paints a very unflattering portrait of provincial German life, where the riches of Sunday dinner are contrasted with the cold emptiness of Sunday services, where the women's constant "Kaffee-Klatches" consist mainly of gossip about whichever neighbors aren't present that day.

Teresa just posted about deceptive back cover blurbs, and whoever wrote this one for Virago is equally guilty:

This enchanting story tells of the love affair between Rose-Marie Schmidt and Roger Anstruther.  A determined young woman of twenty-five, Rose-Marie is considered a spinster by the inhabitants of the small German town of Jena where she lives with her father, the Professor.  To their home comes Roger, an impoverished but well-born young Englishman who wishes to learn German: Rose-Marie and Roger fall in love.  But the course of true love does not run smooth: distance, temperament and fortune divide them. We watch the ebb and flow of love between two very different people and see the witty and wonderful Rose-Marie get exactly what she wants.

Reading this, one would never know that the story starts after Roger has left Jena.  It's not as if we get to see them fall in love, we only learn about that in retrospect, from Rose-Marie's letters.  And that last sentence is completely misleading.  I find the ending rather bleak, and very ambiguous (like others of von Arnim's stories).  There is a hint that she may follow in her creator's footsteps, and become a writer.  I wonder if Elizabeth von Arnim ever thought about the later lives of her characters.  Jane Austen used to tell her family little snippets, like Kitty Bennet marrying a clergyman with a living near Pemberley.  I wish more authors did that.

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, Elizabeth von Arnim

After The Pastor's Wife, it was quite a while before I had the urge to read Elizabeth von Arnim again.  It is a very good book, but very bleak in places, and it was one of the most intense and disconcerting reading experiences I've had in a while.  Lately though I've been thinking of summer books, which reminded me that I had this one still on the TBR shelves.  It is an account of a summer tour the titular Elizabeth takes, eleven days on the island of Rügen in the Baltic, off the Pomeranian coast.  It was nowhere near as intense as The Pastor's Wife, but it wasn't quite what I expected either, shifting from a travelogue to a domestic farce, with philosophical and sociological excursions on the side.  By this time, I should be expecting the unexpected from Elizabeth von Arnim.

The book opens in Elizabeth's beloved Nassenheide in Pomerania, the setting for Elizabeth and Her German Garden (as well as its sequel, The Solitary Summer).  But this summer will be different.  It is blazingly hot, and there is a drought (much like Houston right now).  She doesn't want to sit "watching a garden parch browner day by day beneath a sky of brass."  In the schloss's library she comes across books that tell of Rügen,

an island of twists and curves and inland seas called Bodden; of lakes, and woods, and frequent ferries; with lesser islands dotted about its coasts; with bays innumerable stretching their arms out into the water; and with one huge forest, evidently magnificent, running nearly the whole length of the east coast, following its curves, dipping down to the sea in places, and in others climbing up chalk cliffs to crown them with the peculiar splendour of beeches.

Reading that, I was nearly ready to book a ticket to Rügen myself.

Elizabeth's initial plan is to enlist a woman friend to join her on a walking tour.  One after another, a dozen of her friends decline, saying that "that it would make them tired and that it would be dull."  She cannot go alone, for reasons of both propriety and safety, so she decides to travel by coach, taking her own driver, August, as well as her faithful maid Gertrud.  This immediately sets her apart from the other tourists on the island, who arrive by train or ferry, but it ensures her independence in traveling.  She can go wherever the horses take her, whenever she pleases (though to placate the Man of Wrath, left behind with the children, she has to take care not to overwork the horses).

Much of the first part of the book is travelogue: the trip to the island, the start of their tour, the villages they drive through, the surrounding countryside, and especially the sea.  Elizabeth bathes wherever she can, drawn to the clear cold waters and the beautiful beaches.  In between the descriptons are adventures and mishaps that reminded me a little of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men books.  Like him, she points out some of the foibles of German life, particularly the tendency to build unattractive cafés right in the middle of the most picturesque sites.  Elizabeth later meets two English tourists, Mrs Harvey-Browne and her son Brosy, which gives her a chance to needle the English as well.  Mrs Harvey-Browne is the wife of a bishop (von Arnim seems to have had it in for Anglican bishops), which impresses her much more than it does anyone else she meets.  Her son is a student of philosophy, much given to discussions of the Absolute.  Elizabeth is also surprised (and somewhat dismayed) to come across her cousin Charlotte, whom she has not seen in many years.  When they are joined by Charlotte's husband, the elderly but spry Professor Nieberlein, of whom the Harvery-Brownes are ardent admirers, Elizabeth sees her plans for a peaceful, solitary holiday collapsing.

More than once in her book, Elizabeth apologizes because she meant to write "a useful Guide to Rügen," but "With every page I write it grows more plain that I shall not fulfil that intention. What, for instance, have Charlotte and the bishop's wife of illuminating for the tourist who wants to be shown the way?"  Though I don't think this book was ever taken for a guidebook, even at its publication in 1904, it is still a lovely introduction to the island and actually includes a lot of information.  And as Elizabeth von Arnim knew very well, Charlotte and the bishop's wife add greatly to the fun of her story.  Charlotte, though, is something of an uneasy character.  Married at twenty to her Professor, forty years her senior, she has now become an ardent feminist, traveling around Europe on behalf of the rights of women (her married life reminds me of Ingeborg's in The Pastor's Wife).  Elizabeth finds her ideas on women and marriage uncomfortable, though she can't help agreeing with some of her points.  She quickly grows tired of Charlotte's stridency, however, taking refuge in the "easeful simplicity of the old conventions."

"Just to think of it gives me a headache. The only thing I know of that does not give a woman a headache is to live the life for which she was intended - the comfortable life with a brain at rest and a body wholly occupied with benevolences . . ."

The Elizabeth of this book may believe that, but Elizabeth von Arnim herself certainly didn't live a "comfortable life with a brain at rest."  Was this just part of the "Elizabeth" persona, like the pretence that she was German?  I am also learning to expect this ambiguity, with Elizabeth von Arnim.

Daughter, wife, muse

The Pastor's Wife, Elizabeth von Arnim

When I started this book, I had only the vaguest idea of the plot: that the title character leaves her home in England to marry a German pastor.  I expected it would draw on Elizabeth von Arnim's own experiences in meeting and marrying Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and moving with him to Germany in 1890.  As I read it, I kept thinking that I knew where the story was going, only to find myself mistaken, as the plot twisted off into a new direction.  In the end, all my expectations were wrong - or perhaps I should say my presumptions.  I was constantly re-evaluating the book as I was reading, which left me feeling off-balance.  It was the oddest reading experience I've had in a long time.

Just a warning, there will be spoilers ahead.

I don't mean to give the impression that I didn't enjoy this book, because I did, very much.  This is Elizabeth von Arnim at her sharpest and most satirical, and wickedly funny.  The humor here reminded me of The Caravaners, one of my favorites among her books.  But the central character of The Pastor's Wife is much more sympathetic than Baron Otto von Ottringel, who narrates The Caravaners and is neatly skewered throughout.  I was drawn to Ingeborg Bullivant from the first page, walking down Regent Street on an April morning, delightfully alone.  The elder daughter of the Bishop of Redchester in the west country, 22 years old, she lives a busy life in the Palace, acting as her father's secretary, representing her sofa-bound mother on social occasions, and chaperoning her sister Judith to parties and dances.  She owes her unprecedented freedom to dental problems that required a specialist's care.  Her family wanted her restored to health and activity as soon as possible, so her father sent her off to London with £10 and instructions not return until she was better, even if it took a week or ten days.

It took the dentist no time at all to extract the problem tooth, leaving Ingeborg free for the day in London.  She is considering how to spend her 24 hours before catching the train home when she sees a poster outside an office: "A Week In Lovely Lucerne, Seven Days For Seven Guineas."  Hardly stopping to think, she walks into the office and pays her fee, for a tour leaving the next day.  Good for her, I thought.  Here is her declaration of independence, from father and Palace.  She will find a new life opening up for her in Lucerne.

Well, yes and no.  On the train to Dover, she is seated across a person who is obviously a foreigner.  When they fall into conversation, she learns that he is Robert Dremmel, a Lutheran pastor who proclaims that his real vocation is manure (to the shock of their neighbors).  He has devoted himself to scientific agriculture, to improve the poor soil of eastern Prussia, where he lives.  As the tour continues, Herr Dremmel finds himself falling in love with Ingeborg, in part because (trained by her father) she is an excellent listener, "intelligent without argument, a most comfortable compound..."  Though he has never seriously contemplated marriage before, he soon decides that he will marry her.  She is taken aback by his proposal, she dislikes what she terms his "clutchings," and she is not in love with him.  Robert simply talks over all her objections and arranges a formal betrothal ceremony.  In one of my favorite scenes, he slips a note under Ingeborg's door to inform her that the ceremony will take place the next morning: "Since no man can be betrothed alone, it will be necessary that you should be there."  However, not knowing which is her room, he put identical notes under eight doors, and seven women find their way to the room before Ingeborg.  She arrives determined to say no, but she is overwhelmed by the witnesses and Robert's calm assumption of their engagement.

She returns to Redchester to break the news of her betrothal to a Lutheran pastor from east Prussia, and all hell breaks loose in the Palace.  As painful as the events are for Ingeborg, they are great fun to read.  Von Arnim saves some of her sharpest knives for the Bishop, "handsome as an archangel, silvery of head and gaitered of leg," who is furious over her rebellious and undutiful behavior, which will deprive him of his unpaid secretary.  (The separation from a daughter goes unremarked.)  Her mother will not help her.  Though perfectly well, she spends her days on the sofa.  Early in her married life she "discovered in it a refuge and a very present help in all the troubles and turmoils of life, and in especial a shield and a buckler when it came to dealing with the Bishop."  Ingeborg's younger sister Judith has just become engaged to the Master of an Oxford college, a man her father's age, who will soon (in the Bishop's mind) leave her "the most magnificent of widows."  If Judith seems unenthusiastic about her own coming marriage, she joins her father in disdaining Ingeborg's. To show their displeasure, her parents and Judith effectively shun Ingeborg.  After a week of such treatment, it is hardly surprising that she welcomes Robert's arrival in Redchester.  His ardent courtship seems to offer her love, a life outside the narrow confines of the Palace, and in response her feelings toward him grow warmer (though she still dislikes the clutching).

They are married by the Bishop in the Cathedral at Redchester and set off for Robert's Prussian home, a small village called Kökensee.  At this point, I expected perhaps a story of adjustment, both to marriage and to Germany.  I wondered how a daughter of an Anglican palace would learn to be a Lutheran pastor's wife.  I thought that this might become the story of how Ingeborg, like Elizabeth von Arnim, eventually found her way to her own German garden.  Well, yes and no.  Ingeborg is not the first to find a great difference between a courting suitor and a husband.  Once back on his home soil, Robert reverts to his vocation of scientific agriculture, locking himself into his study to to carry out his experiments with grain and manure.  He is kind to Ingeborg when he notices her.  He alternates Sunday services between the two churches in his parish, preaching one of the 26 sermons that he keeps on hand, rotating them through each year (the parish particularly enjoys the annual Advent sermon on the slaughter of pigs, anticipating their Christmas sausages).  His parishioners are quite satisfied with their disengaged shepherd, and they make it clear to Ingeborg that they don't need "Frau Pastor" trying to practice good works among them.

Ingeborg finds herself with few responsibilities, and her first summer in her new home is one of glorious freedom.  She wanders through the woods and the fields, she luxuriates in flowers and birds and berries, she takes a punt along the shore of a neighboring lake.  As the winter closes in, curtailing her expeditions, she learns that after many false starts, she is pregnant with her first child.  The news brings Robert to tears of joy.  Aha, I thought, a new chapter of her life opening up.  Deprived of her parents' love and care, with a husband mentally and physically absent, she will find joy in motherhood, in her children, perhaps her own "April, May and June babies."  Wrong again. 

After a difficult pregnancy, as Robert grows impatient with her illness and her increasing size, she almost dies during a botched delivery.  She suffers an injury nursing the child, a boy named for his father, and she struggles for months with postpartum depression.  When she finally recovers enough to notice the baby again, she is dismayed not to feel the love that everyone tells her is a mother's highest and best feeling.  She is equally dismayed to find that, just as she is feeling herself again, making plans to return to her walks, her punt, to introduce the baby to the wonders of the world, she is pregnant again.  The cycle repeats itself five more times in the next six years, though only her second child, a daughter, survives with Robertlet.  This section makes for grim reading.  Von Arnim herself had five children, and she writes plainly of the difficulties and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth.  Though not explicit in today's terms, it is franker than I expected of a book published in 1914.  I would not recommend this book to a woman in her first pregnancy.

Ingeborg's doctor intervenes after the sixth pregnancy ends with a second still-born child, sending her off with a nurse to a sea-side resort.  She returns after four months, recovering in mind and body.  But she knows that her complete recovery requires more.  She steels her courage to ask the astounded Robert if "this wild career of - of unbridled motherhood" might end?  Immured in his laboratory, Robert might not have much use for a wife, but he does have one, and he absolutely rejects the idea that Ingeborg could refuse to "live with her husband as his wife."  At one point he goes up to their bedroom

to end the matter by the shortest possible route to reason. He would have it out even to the extent of severity and have done with it.  He was the master, and if she forced him to emphasize the fact he would.

Ingeborg escapes the threat of marital rape by having taken refuge in the children's room.  Again, I wondered how this would have read in 1914.  Some must have taken Robert's side, in his traditional view of marriage and wifely duties, but surely there must have been women who saw themselves in Ingeborg's situation.  Again, it is the doctor who intervenes, speaking plain truths to Robert, and telling Ingeborg,

"Your one duty now is to keep well in body and mind, provide your two children with a capable mother and your husband with a companion possessed of the intelligent amiability that springs from good health . . . I will not allow you to turn him, who deserves so well of fate, into that unhappy object a widower."

Unfortunately for Ingeborg, Robert shows no interest in an amiable companion who will not perform her wifely duties.  He ignores her even more persistently than before.  Her two surviving children are round phlegmatic things that show no interest in games or outdoor activities.  They patiently endure their mother's kisses and hugs but give no affection in return.  They much prefer going to school, which means they can board with their German grandmother, who has never approved of her English daughter-in-law.  Neither wife nor mother, Ingeborg must make a life for herself.  Feeling uneducated and provincial, she embarks on a regimen of reading, and she also immerses herself again in nature.

One day, paddling down the lake in the punt, she meets a celebrated English artist, Edward Ingram, who is staying with the local count's family.  Finally, I thought.  Here is someone who will love Ingeborg as she deserves, and rescue her from her small Prussian life.  Wrong again.  Ingram is instantly attracted to her, or to an idea of her, as "a perfect little seething vessel of independent happiness, bubbling over with your own contentments."  Despite his fame, he is restless, driven by his art yet fearing that he is wasting his talents on society portraits.  Separated from his wife, he is a notorious womanizer who soon tires of his conquests.  Ingeborg knows nothing of the seedier side of his life.  She admires his work and relishes the chance to talk with someone so cosmopolitan.  As they continue to meet and to talk, she does not realize that he is falling in love with her, taking his extravagant compliments as teasing.  His compliments go on and on and on, as he proclaims her his soul-mate, his life-force, his muse.  He sketches her constantly, with growing power, and he repeatedly declares that he must paint her.  But he can only paint her in his studio, in Venice, and he begins a campaign to convince her to come with him to Italy.  It is her duty, he tells her, to help him create the masterpiece that her portrait will be.

This is where I began to have trouble with the story.  I could accept that Ingeborg, having lived a constrained life both in Redchester and Kökensee, might not be able to see through the flattery, to see Ingram for what he really is.  I can certainly understand how much she has wanted someone to talk to all those years, and how strongly she feels the lure of travel itself, particularly to Italy.  But I had a hard time accepting that a bishop's daughter and a pastor's wife would agree to travel to Italy with another man, convincing herself that it is just a trip with a friend, while at the same time deceiving her husband to think she is only going on a shopping trip to Berlin.  Yet this self-delusion has quite entertaining consequences: Ingeborg has no idea she is running away with Ingram.  He keeps trying to seduce her, but she is completely distracted with the novelty of travel, with the new scenes opening before her.  To his disgust, she even tries to send Robert postcards along the way, to share her joy with him.  When Ingram finally makes the situation clear, Ingeborg is horrified,  Staying with Ingram never ever crosses her mind.  Her one thought is to get safely back to Robert.  But will he welcome her back, or will he rather punish her for her great sin?

I think that Elizabeth von Arnim meant Ingeborg to be a sympathetic character, through whom she explores the limited roles available to women at the time.  Ingeborg tries to be faithful to her roles as daughter, wife and mother, despite the difficulties that she faces, and to do her duty cheerfully.  Ingram offers what might seem like wider horizons, but eventually she realizes that they come at a steep price, the end of her marriage.  The reader knows, as she doesn't, that she also risks finding herself abandoned when his infatuation wears off.  Though it is unclear when this story is set, by the time it was published in 1914, women in Britain and North America were finding more opportunities for education and careers, as they would in even greater numbers after the Great War ended.  Will those years bring change to Kökensee, to Ingeborg's life?  Will she still be able to find happiness in her essentially solitary life in a small backwards Prussian village?  I want to think so, but she deserves so much more.

Summer reading

The Solitary Summer, Elizabeth von Arnim

A recent review of this book (I wish I could remember where) reminded me that I had a copy of it on the TBR stacks, perfect for summer reading. I was expecting a sequel of sorts to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, focused on the summer months in her beloved garden on the family's estate in Nassenheide, Pomerania (now called Rzędziny), with her husband (the famous "Man of Wrath") and her three little girls, the April, May & June babies. Like the earlier book, this is in the form of a journal, which begins in May and ends in October. In the first entry, Elizabeth tells her husband,

"I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there is peace."

He warns her that she'll catch cold and sunburn lying around in the fields, people will think she is mad, and she will be bored, but "You know you do as you please, and I never interfere with you." He reminded me a bit of Marmee in Little Women, when the four girls want to spend their vacation time free even from their household work, who wants to teach them that all play is just as bad for them as all work. I settled in to read, already envious of her long leisurely summer days (and sure she would prove her husband wrong in the end). But while there is plenty of discussion of her garden, her delight in it, her frank accounts of her failures with it, the peace she indeed finds, it moves far beyond her garden, and I found those excursions fascinating.

Elizabeth usually takes a book with her on her rambles, which leads to a discussion of how books must be read in their proper place and at the proper time. Thoreau is for outdoor reading, out of place inside the house, while Boswell and Johnson belong "in the library when the lamps are lit . . . surrounded by every sign of civilisation." She moves from there to a meditation on reading: "What a blessing it is to love books." In her library, her favorite books are in cases built around a central pillar. The books on these shelves

lose the gloss of their new coats, and put on the comfortable look of old friends in every-day clothes, under the frequent touch of affection. They are such special friends that I can hardly pass them without a nod and smile at the well-known covers, each of which has some pleasant association of time and place to make it still more dear.

As her tastes change, books are promoted or demoted from the central cases to the wall cases, or to even more distant shelves - a system that we have in common. I love re-arranging shelves to accommodate some wonderful new book, debating which one must give way. I was glad to see that the first author she names from the prime favorite shelves is Jane Austen. I'd love to know which books are among the American and French and German children's books that she continues to read and love.

On one of the rare cloudy and windy days of the summer, Elizabeth's conscience drives her to make some long-delayed visits to the tenants in the village (reminding me of Austen's Emma on a similar errand when she meets Mr Elton). And suddenly the book becomes something of a social history, as she takes us into the cramped cottages and describes health and hygiene and diet. And in this book published in 1899, she calmly tells us that most of the couples in the area already have a child, in the cradle or on the way, by the time that they marry. While the local pastor denounces the sin and the sinners, his parishioners carry on, and Elizabeth herself can't condemn them, because "They only know and follow nature..." and divine forgiveness must surely encompass them. I found the whole discussion fascinating, and I wondered what her Victorian readers made of it.

One evening she drives out to an old mill for a solitary picnic. The elderly caretaker who lives there "informed me once that all women are mistakes, especially that aggravated form called wives . . ." As she sits in the gloaming, reading The Sorrows of Werther, suddenly she declares,

But here I am talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way no woman should. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained and uneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? . . . Sitting there long after it was too dark to read, I thought of the old miller's words, and agreed with him that the best thing a woman can do in this world is to keep quiet.

Where in the world, I thought, did that come from? Is this "Elizabeth" speaking, or the real-life Mary Annette Beauchamp, who did not keep quiet, who spoke so frequently and definitely through her books? It is hardly a positive argument for the training and education of women. This might have been written by Baron von Ottringel of The Caravaners, whose pomposities about the proper place of women she so slyly tears to shreds. And then the book ends in October, with a discussion between husband and wife, and a final question that I find equally hard to interpret.

As often happens, this book was not what I expected, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as it left me puzzling over some of its parts.

A story of love

Love, Elizabeth von Arnim

The Enchanted April was my introduction to Elizabeth von Arnim last year, and she became one of my literary crushes.  I added several of her books to the TBR pile, but I've only now got around to reading this one.  From the back cover blurb of Love, I knew the basic premise: an older woman's relationship with a younger man.  From glancing at the introduction, I learned about Elizabeth von Arnim's own affair with a man thirty years her junior.  From reading some of her other books, I was expecting a comic, perhaps cynical version of a May-December affair.  But to my surprise, this book turned out to be nothing like what I expected.  As the title suggests, it is a story of love.

Catherine and Christopher meet at a play that draws small but fanatical audiences who learn to recognize fellow devotées.  The first time they notice each other, it is her fifth visit, and his 32nd.  Four performances later, Christopher moves to sit beside her, and in the intervals they talk.  He is half in love with her before he ever learns her name, or anything about her.  While he knows that she is older than he is, he takes no notice of that.  Catherine, who has a good idea just how much older she is, can't help but be flattered by his attentions.  A widow with a married daughter, she hardly takes them seriously, enjoying his company and his devotion, until she realizes that he has fallen in love with her.  When neither her true age (47 to his 25) nor the existence of her grown-up married daughter bring Christopher to his senses, Catherine tries to break things off with him.  But he simply refuses to accept that.  In a moment of passion, his kiss shocks Catherine into recognizing her own feelings, but also brings a sense of shame, of impropriety.

Fleeing both Christopher and her feelings, she seeks refuge with her daughter Virginia, now living with her husband Stephen at the family's home in Chickover, which she inherited on her father's death, and pregnant with her first child.  Stephen Colquhoun, the rector of the parish, is himself a year older than Catherine, making him thirty years older than his wife.  This May-December pairing is a happy and passionate one, with Stephen very much the dominant partner.  It is also a very private one.  While Stephen's mother lives in the village and is a frequent visitor, none of the three is pleased to see Catherine, who cannot explain why she has fled to her old home.  Stephen travels to London on the weekends to preach a series of sermons on Love, the focus of which is marital love, infused with his own late emotional development.  It is painfully obvious, though, both to Catherine and the reader, that whatever he or Virginia says about love, there is little room in their hearts or their life for her.  When Christopher rides unexpectedly to the rescue, on a motor-cycle with a side-car, Catherine cannot resist returning to London with him, however inappropriate Stephen and his mother may consider it.  This journey, seemingly such a simple one, will lead to their marriage, and further complications in their relationship, and in Catherine's with her family.

I was constantly surprised by the turns that the story took.  I was also surprised by how invested I found myself in Catherine and Christopher, and even in Virginia, how strongly I wanted things to go well for them.  I found myself peeking ahead, something I rarely do.  Catherine is a very sympathetic character, a good person who desperately wants to do the right thing.  She has spent her life caring for her husband and her child, cheerfully accepting her place in the background.  She makes the best of her widowhood, which under her husband's will left her only £500 a year and a London flat while her daughter inherited everything else, including her home.  In London, even in her reduced circumstances, she has re-discovered relations and found friends, and life seems to be opening out before her in a quiet way suited to her age and circumstances - and then she meets Christopher, who opens her life up in unquiet and unsuitable ways. 

In this book Elizabeth von Arnim is exploring more than just romantic love, though that takes center stage with the two very different couples and their relationships.  She also focuses on love between parents and children, from both points of view.  In addition, she considers how love is expressed, how it is made real, how it is lived.  The contrast between what Stephen preaches about love, and how he practices it toward everyone but his wife and mother, could not be clearer.  Virginia is torn between her love for her mother and her husband, particularly Stephen's disapproval of Catherine and Christopher.  They in turn face the challenges of most marriages, moving from the ecstasies of courtship to the practicalities of married life.

Love was published in 1925 but feels very topical in 2012.  May-December romances are of course common in stories, and now in celebrity culture, though an older woman-younger man pairing still draws more attention and comment than the reverse (I would be very glad if I never again hear the word "cougar" applied to a woman).  Reading Love reminded me of Dorothy Dunnett's Nicholas de Fleury, whose first marriage is almost as complicated and unwelcome as Christopher's.  Stephen made me think particularly of all the film pairings I find most uncomfortable, like Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon (she was so frequently paired with much older men, and Cary Grant was supposedly embarrassed by it in Charade).  There is something a little creepy about Stephen's history with Virginia:

"[He] had had his thoughtful eye on Virginia from the beginning.  When he went there she was five and he was thirty-four. Dear little child; he played with her. Presently she was fifteen, and he was forty-four. Sweet little maid; he prepared her for confirmation. Again presently she was eighteen, and he was forty-seven. Touching young bud of womanhood; he proposed to her." 

I couldn't help thinking of Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen's Emma, but after all he is a far different (and better) person than Stephen, and the difference in age and experience isn't as great.

As much as I wanted a happy ending, particularly for Catherine and Christopher, von Arnim doesn't give us one.  The ending is ambiguous, and we are left to write our own.  I do worry about the fate of one character introduced in the last pages; I fear his future at Chickover will be bleak.

The enchanted garden

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Elizabeth von Arnim

I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim earlier this year, when I read The Enchanted April almost in one sitting.  As often happens with a new-to-me author, I then had a long list of her books to look forward to.  I've since gone on to read Christopher and Columbus and The Caravaners.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden is of course the first book that von Arnim published, in 1898, and it was a runaway best-seller, going through eleven printings that first year and ten more in 1899.  It is a diary of her life over the course of a year, living on her husband's estate in Nassenheide, Pomerania.  After some Google and Wikipedia research, I learned that Nassenheide is now called Rzędziny and sits on the border between Gernany and Poland (and that unfortunately nothing remains of the famous gardens).  After reading so much about Prussia in the letters of Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess, it seemed a good time to read this.  Like the younger Victoria, Elizabeth left her home in England when she married an older man, moving with him to his Prussian home.  Like the Crown Princess, she was homesick for her family and England, she found Prussian society somewhat stifling, and she disliked living in Berlin.  On a visit to Nassenheide, she fell instantly in love with its 17th century schloss and its derelict gardens, and she persuaded her husband to live there at least part of the year.

When the book opens, Elizabeth is living there alone, supposedly supervising the renovations to the house, but actually spending her time in the garden, luxuriating not just in the beauties of nature but in her solitude, away from the cares of husband and children.  Thirty years before A Room of One's Own, I am sure many women reading her book envied her that time above everything.  I found myself wondering if the Crown Princess (by then the Dowager Empress) had ever read it and what she might have thought of it.

The book includes detailed descriptions of the gardens, what is planted, how it grows (or doesn't), what she would like to do, and the frustrations of directing the work, rather than getting her own hands in the dirt.  Only once does she manage it:

"If I could only dig and plant myself!  How much easier, besides being so fascinating . . . I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants' dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea and run back very hot and guilty into the house and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.  And why not?  It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple."

The diary entries also show us Elizabeth's husband, the famous "Man of Wrath" (who reminds me not a little of Baron von Ottringel of The Caravaners), her three charming daughters, "the babies,"  as well as neighbors, estate workers, and visitors.  Two visitors make an extended and not completely welcome stay over the Christmas holidays, and Elizabeth takes them on a winter picnic to the shores of the Baltic, a fourteen-mile drive in the snow and cold.  Though it is difficult to picnic under those conditions, the beauty of the scene makes up for all:

"For a long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep blue line, and a cluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a narrow strip of pale yellow sand; right and left the line of sparkling forest; and we ourselves standing in a world of white and diamond traceries.  The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place like a benediction."

Like The Enchanted April, this is a book to treasure and to re-read.

On holiday with the Baron

The Caravaners, Elizabeth von Arnim

When I started looking for Elizabeth von Arnim's books, which was even before I finished The Enchanted April, I initially passed over The Caravaners.  But when I saw a reference comparing it to Three Men in a Boat, I immediately started looking for a copy. And I'm so glad that I did!

This is the story of a holiday trip by caravan, through the southeastern counties of England, narrated by Baron Otto von Ottringel of Storchwerder, in Prussia. He and his wife Edelgard join a neighbor, the beautiful widow Frau von Eckthum, in the trip she has arranged with her sister, married to an Englishman, and various friends.  Though the Baron has a low opinion of England and the English, he succumbs both to the Frau's charms and to the idea of a cheap holiday (no hotel bills! no train tickets to buy!).  This August holiday is meant to be a celebration of the Baron's twenty-five years of married life.  Not his silver anniversary with Edelgard; they have only been married five years.  Previously married almost twenty years before his wife's death, the Baron feels entitled to all the perks of the anniversary, because after all he has been married twenty-five years.  He is rather miffed that his family and friends do not take the proper view of it and express their congratulations in the form of silver coins and gifts.

By the end of the first chapter, we have a pretty clear understanding of the Baron, one that would surprise him, if he weren't so completely entrenched in his own superiority as an officer and a gentleman, and above all a German.  Much of the comedy in the story flows from this, that while the Baron is telling this story, and we see everything through his eyes, he is so obtuse, unobservant, and self-centered that we can see around him, all the things that he misses, the real story of what is happening.

The tour, promising so much pleasure, soon dissolves into a plodding misery.  Part of the reason is the weather, cold with unseasonable rain that turns roads and fields into mud.  This was the only place where I felt a minute twinge of empathy with the Baron, because I don't like camping under those conditions either.  It didn't last, though because the main source of misery is the Baron himself.  He complains constantly, he expects to be waited on, he shirks his share the work of camping. He toadeats one of the party, a younger son of the Duke of Hereford, and snubs another, a socialist MP, while pursuing Frau von Eckthum (mainly by talking at her non-stop).  And he berates his wife Edelgard, who begins to break out of the role the Baron and his God have laid out for her: "the plain, flat-haired, tightly buttoned up, God-fearing wife and mother, who looks up to her husband and after her children, and is extremely intelligent in the kitchen and not at all intelligent out of it."

When Edelgard, without so much as asking her husband's permission, changes her hairstyle and shortens her skirts, when she neglects to wait on him, when she chooses to walk and talk with other members of the party, including the male ones, the Baron can hardly contain himself.  Even the flimsiness of the caravan's walls, which provide no privacy, can't restrain his rebukes.  And though he keeps most of his opinions of the degenerate English for the pages of his narrative, the rest of the party can hardly be in doubt of them either.

The Baron is a great comic villain.  I longed to see him get his come-uppance, but at the end of his story he is stolidly ensconced once again in Storchwerder, writing his account of the trip.  The only cloud on his horizon is the unaccountable failure of his superiors to promote him to colonel.  He can congratulate himself, though, that his rebellious wife, as "the influence of Storchwerder presses more heavily upon her . . . shows an increasing tendency once more to find her level."  I did find myself wondering where the Baron will be by 1918, and if the Baroness might possibly find herself free, or still locked into "kinder küche kirche."

Two innocents in America

Christopher and Columbus, Elizabeth von Arnim

One of the symptoms of a new literary crush is that I immediately start looking for the other books that my new discovery has written (I'm currently waiting on Otis Skinner's autobiography from the library).  I was introduced to Elizabeth von Arnim with The Enchanted April, and the copy I read included brief descriptions of several of her books.  Of course I will be reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden, but what really caught my eye was Christopher and Columbus:

"As the First World War looms, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, seventeen-year-old orphan twins, are thrust upon relatives. But Uncle Arthur, a blustering patriot, is a reluctant guardian: the twins are half-German and, who knows, they could be spying from the nursery window ... Packed off to America ..."

This all sounded so intriguing, from the Great War setting to the Sara Crewe element to the voyage to America.  Maybe my expectations were initially too high, because the first part of the book dragged a little for me.  I didn't find the twins quite as captivating as I think I was supposed to, though to be fair we meet them at a very depressing moment, as they huddle together on the deck of the ship taking them to America. The twins' mother returned to her native England after the death of their Junker father.  She died shortly afterwards, leaving them to their Aunt Alice and her husband Arthur, a spiritual twin of Mellersh Wilkins and Vernon Dursley.  England is in the early days of the Great War, and Uncle Arthur already hates Germans, even half-Germans. In the world of this book, the father's nationality trumps the mother's, in part because the twins speak English with an accent (a rolling R), and in part because everybody automatically hates Germans.

Still, I found it hard to believe that Uncle Arthur could have these seventeen-year-old girls put on a ship to America, alone and in second class, with £210 and two letters of introduction.  Even Sara Crewe got to stay in the attic bedroom and eat kitchen scraps.  Aunt Alice, worn down by twenty years of marriage to Uncle Arthur, is torn between her duty to him and to her nieces, but in the end she chooses her husband.  What she needs is a trip to Italy in April

On the boat, the two Annas meet Edward Twist, an American returning from France.  The inventor of the marvelous "Twist's Non-Trickler Teapot," he has funded an ambulance and has driven it himself at the front, and he is now returning for a leave in America.  He becomes increasingly concerned about their situation, eventually appointing himself their de facto guardian.  Their adventures after the ship reaches New York make up the rest of the book, with Twist trying to ride herd on two devastatingly lovely and outspoken young women, while becoming more and more attached to them.

Much is made of America's status as a neutral country, and yet the twins face constant hostility when their German identity is disclosed.  They are automatically assumed to be spies or German agents, much as Americans of Japanese descent were in World War II.  I saw from the biographical note in the book that von Arnim traveled to America in 1916, after the break-up of her marriage to Earl Russell, so she may have seen this prejudice at first hand. The information that her daughter, Felicitas, died in Germany during the war adds a poignant note to Anna-Felicitas' name, and to the book as a whole.

April in the garden

The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim

How have I never read Elizabeth von Arnim before now?  I knew The Enchanted April from the 1992 film starring Michael Kitchen - well, he wasn't the star, but he was the reason I watched it.  And yet, despite the well-known Purist Principle that The Book Is Always Better, I never got around to reading it until now.

I feel that I'm probably the last person in the reading world who hasn't read this, so discussing the plot would be superfluous.  For me, the heart of the story is the transformation of the four women who come together to stay at the "small mediaeval castle on the shores of the Mediterranean" for the month of April.  I think it is Mrs. Wilkins, the first character that we meet, who undergoes the greatest change.  We meet her as a Cinderella, slaving away not for evil stepsisters but for a domineering, demanding husband who has worn her down to a grey shadow.  We don't even learn her name, Lotty, until she arrives in Italy.  Yet it is she who approaches Rose Arbuthnot, a stranger to her, and suggests they rent the small castle.  From that moment on, she seems to reclaim herself, to rediscover love, and to spark the transformation not only of Rose but also of the two other residents.  Mrs Fisher, with her tales of "Eminent Victorians I Have Known," is a comic terror, and the battles she wages over precedence and the best rooms in the castle reminded me of Mapp and Lucia.  The fourth resident, Lady Caroline Dester, just wants time alone, away from the greedy attentions of those she terms "grabbers," those who in their affection or attraction want to leech on to her; time to think, to discern.

Lady Caroline's epiphany comes very late in the book, and it isn't the most convincing, but then this is a fairy tale, and closing the book I can well believe that everyone lived happily ever after.

Note: I should have mentioned that it was Kristin's reivew over at Bookmarks and Teacups that inspired me to get this from the library.