Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Read online

  The Collected Works of

  ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

  (1866-1941)

  Contents

  The Novels

  ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

  THE SOLITARY SUMMER

  THE BENEFACTRESS

  PRINCESS PRISCILLA’S FORTNIGHT

  FRÄULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR ANSTRUTHER

  THE CARAVANERS

  THE PASTOR’S WIFE

  CHRISTINE

  CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS

  IN THE MOUNTAINS

  VERA

  THE ENCHANTED APRIL

  The Children’s Book

  THE APRIL BABY’S BOOK OF TUNES

  The Travel Writing

  THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RÜGEN

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2017

  Version 1

  The Collected Works of

  ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

  By Delphi Classics, 2017

  with introductions by Gill Rossini

  www.gillrossini.com

  COPYRIGHT

  Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2017.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 9781786560872

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

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  The Novels

  The Kirribilli peninsula, including Sydney Harbour, New South Wales — Elizabeth von Arnim’s birthplace

  Yacht racing off Kirribilli Point, c. 1900

  ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

  WITH TWELVE PHOTOGRAVURE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

  First published in both America and Britain in 1898 by Macmillan, this book – sometimes described as “imaginative autobiography” and which today might also be seen as “creative non fiction”, includes many parallels with the author’s life, though this must not be taken literally. The writer E. M. Forster, who was tutor to von Arnim’s children at the time, declared he had never seen a garden such as the one in described in the book, at the seventeenth century von Arnim schloss, Nassenheide, in Pomerania (it was more of a wooded glade than a flower garden, according to Hugh Walpole, who succeeded Forster in the role). The property in question was where the author and her first husband, Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, spent their first years together. This book also established the pen name used by the author for most of her publications – her real name was Mary Annette, but all her published works are given the name of “Elizabeth”. The accepted reason for this change of name seems to be her need to protect her aristocratic husband’s good name from the demeaning commercialism of a working wife.

  For a first novel it was extremely popular, especially in Britain and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century, earning von Arnim £10,000 (over a million pounds in today’s money), which made her financially independent. The author is now receiving a renewed attention from literary scholars, who have added her to the category of “middlebrow” writers deserving of study.

  The story is presented in diary format and opens with lyrical descriptions of the house, gardens and surroundings of Nassenheide – “My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows and beyond are great stretches of sandy heath and pine forests … the forests are beautiful in their lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet…In the middle of this plain is the oasis of birdcherries and greenery where I spend my happy days and in the middle of the oasis is the gray stone house with many gables”. In reality, the garden had not been tended for a quarter of a century, even though the main character and her husband have been married for five years; both Elizabeths, the author and the character of the narrative, resolved to bring enough order to the overgrown grounds “with dandelions up to the very door” to make it into a pleasant place to spend summer days.

  The three children in the story are referred to by their month of birth – April, May and June; there are some charming vignettes about the children that will either appeal to the reader as pleasingly of their time, or they will grate as being mawkish and unnecessary. The flowers that grow abundantly in the garden are also used to decorate the house, as the photographic illustrations show.

  In this first published work, von Arnim displays a joie de vivre that has been likened to the lightness of touch and the emphasis on an elysian focus of some eighteenth-century writings and paintings (think of The Swing by Jean-Honore Fragonard and the fashion for hameau – model hamlets - such as Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine at the Palace of Versailles). The Elizabeth of the narrative has some opinions that may leave the modern reader somewhat taken aback – on the subject of household chores, there is no attempt at housewifely attributes: “…news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could.” This, despite the fact that Elizabeth sees organising a household and the servants as such a burden that she needs the garden to escape into when it gets too much!

  Naturally, Elizabeth also has a gardener to do all the physical work for her. There are digressions, such as Elizabeth’s visit to her childhood home and reminiscences about her childhood, such as descriptions of where she grew up and a word portrait of her esteemed grandfather; here von Arnim’s own origins are sacrificed to those of a German childhood (the author was born in Australia and raised in Britain). The reader also learns about the Russian and Polish migrant workers that were recruited each year to come and work on the estate. Their living and working conditions seem appalling and the author’s likening them to animals in their habits is deeply uncomfortable, but her husband’s opinions on the brutality with which the migrant workers treat their women is equally shocking to the modern reader. Little wonder that Elizabeth’s moody and high-handed husband is referred to in the narrative as “The Man of Wrath.” In fact, a significant amount of the non-garden content of the book is taken up with discourses and opinions about the position and nature of women and if nothing else, it provides an interesting insight into the conventional gender roles and attitudes of the day in Germany and, no doubt, elsewhere; the author suggests at one point. “I don’t think a husban
d is at all a good thing for a girl to have”. The affluent neighbours, however, on their own estates, are excellent - friendly, but by unspoken mutual arrangement, very much at a distance.

  As the book progresses, we are taken through the seasons; the book will be of great interest to devotees of garden history, as the planting and transformation of the gardens is narrated in plenty of detail (although many of the actual varieties of the flowers used are not always given). We also follow the ebb and flow of family life, customs and festivals, with Christmas and New Year, of course, coming towards the end of the narrative, which the family shares with a rather challenging English guest.

  This is an interesting and rather unusual book, which on the surface seems to be a simple tale of the development of a garden, but alongside that, it also has plenty of commentary about other issues, some of them bordering on the controversial, if written today. Taken along with von Arnim’s novels, it does seem to offer some insights into the author’s personality and opinions.

  The first edition

  The first edition’s title page

  Von Arnim Schloss, Nassenheide, Pomerania, 1860

  The title page illustration in the first American edition

  The original frontispiece

  ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

  May 7th. — I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales. The gentleman owl says , and she answers from her tree a little way off, , beautifully assenting to and completing her lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl. They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.

  This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house, much less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty old place that the people who might have lived here and did not, deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must have belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty; but the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves.

  I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

  There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place. Even across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.

  My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave off the bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green, and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and everywhere the breathless silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful too, for one can see across them into eternity almost, and to go out on to them with one’s face towards the setting sun is like going into the very presence of God.

  In the middle of this plain is the oasis of birdcherries and greenery where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The house is very old, and has been added to at various times. It was a convent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the vaulted chapel, with its brick floor worn by pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall. Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more than once, as is duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what was then the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to his convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who were not without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the wide, empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of silence here.

  From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the plain, with no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue line of distant forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the setting sun — nothing but a green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge against the sunset. I love those west windows better than any others, and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the house so that even times of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and the young woman who attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties about a mistress recumbent in an easychair before an open window, and not to profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.

  We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as well make use of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five years were spent in a flat in a town, and during their whole interminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion. And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear place with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind taking the least notice of it, and in May — in all those five lovely Mays — no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the virginia creeper madder every year, until at last, in October, the very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and not a living creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, which got into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows. All that was here, — peace, and happiness, and a reasonable life, — and yet it never struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and can in no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even use the place in summer, that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every year; until at last, in the early spring of last year, having come down for the opening of the village school, and wandering out afterwards into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child, and the five wasted years fel
l from me like a cloak, and the world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then and there to nature, and have been happy ever since.

  My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone, supposed to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone out of it.

  How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar on my eleven o’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three lawns, — they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed, — and under and among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the birdcherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs — masses and masses of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away in a dream of pink and purple peace.