Forgotten authors
LUCY LETHBRIDGE believes Elizabeth von Arnim’s best novels were written after her more famous German garden series
Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Elizabeth von Arnim’s first book, has rarely been out of print since it was published in 1898.
An autobiographical novel in the form of a diary by a young Englishwoman married to a stuffy Prussian aristocrat, it’s not hard to see the appeal: the book is about the healing power of garden-making but also, because that can get a bit samey, throws in some wincingly rude but astute portraits of human beings. Fed up with her city flat and the stifling formalities of social life in Berlin, Elizabeth has decamped to her husband’s vast estate, where the schloss has been empty since the departure of the nuns who were its last inhabitants. With a mixture of trial, error, whimsy and migrant labour, she creates a garden in the English style: a messy, anarchic profusion of planting in curvy borders. It is an act of revolt against all the straight, rigorously weeded, lines she finds in German gardens and more generally in German bourgeois life and morals – and the book moves between rhapsodic descriptions of creative garden disorder and biting sketches of the locals with their narrow lives, buttoned sofas, puddings, ugly children and retrograde views of women.
Elizabeth’s chafing at her husband’s eye-rollingly awful views on women is the novel’s scratching post. Her tiresomely arch friend Irais is imported to argue with Henning while Elizabeth, having trailed her coat, slips out to look at the garden. Henning was 15 years older than her and does sound a terrible bore: it’s a mystery (an interesting one) how they ever got together. In the novel he is referred to as the Man of Wrath and is forever wondering why she doesn’t give the garden a good tidy-up or retiring magnanimously to his study when an argument looms. We learn much about his firmly held views on wifely duties and that a husband is perfectly justified in knocking a woman about if she shows signs of ‘aspirations’. His wife’s aspirations, however, proved resilient, and following the success of her first book, Elizabeth went on to publish more novels on the theme of witty, effervescent Elizabeth, her garden, her foolish husband and strange, obdurate Germanness.
Elizabeth von Arnim was born May Beauchamp in Australia in 1866 and the family settled in London three years later. She was clever and musical and, at 23, her father took her on an extended tour of the Continent during which she met the German Graf Henning August von Arnim-schlagenthin. He was instantly smitten, pursued her vigorously and married her the moment she’d completed a threemonth intensive German course. They went to live in a comfortable flat in Berlin and, by the time she wrote her first novel, she’d had three of their five children and had created her garden at the Von Arnim estate at Nassenheide (now in Poland, the house bombed into ruins by the British).
Henning died in 1912, three years after the publication of Caravaners, Elizabeth’s irresistibly comic portrait of a German baron and his wife on a caravanning holiday in Sussex with English friends. Seen through the bewildered eyes of the pompous and stupid Man of Wrath (he gets the diary this time) the behaviour of the English is incomprehensible and against nature. The men help with the washing up! Though unimpeachably top-drawer they hold socialist views! The women argue back! When he hears the group whispering about a wife who cannot leave because she so pities her husband’s ‘loneliness’, he doesn’t for a moment think they can be talking about him.
In her widowhood, Elizabeth lived in Switzerland; reports of her celebrated wit, entertainment value and love affairs were legion. It is also interestingly mysterious, therefore, that for her second husband, she chose the alcoholic, convicted bigamist Earl Russell. He was a horror, depicted by Elizabeth in grippingly seductive detail as the empty, narcissistic husband of a child bride in Vera (1921). Von Arnim’s best novels, I think, appear in this period. The mannered fan-batting of the German garden series is replaced by a deeper generosity to the complexity of human behaviour – and to vulnerability. After a painful affair with a man 30 years younger, she wrote the agonising Love – about middle-aged Catherine’s marriage to a boy in his early twenties. But even here the Man of Wrath looms in the form of Catherine’s sanctimonious and self-indulgent vicar son-in-law.
Her final novel, Mr Skeffington, appeared in 1940, a year before her death. It was later made into a film starring Bette Davis. It is a portrait of an ageing beauty, once the toast of London, who finds herself compelled to seek out her old lovers, one by one, only to arrive in the end at the dull, long-forgotten husband on whose money she depends. Mr Skeffington doesn’t seem remotely like a Man of Wrath but even though he appears only at the end of the novel, their reunion is drawn with both tenderness and forgiveness for both parties.
In her widowhood, Elizabeth lived in Switzerland, where reports of her celebrated wit, entertainment value and love affairs were legion