Katherine Mansfield And Elizabeth Von Arnim

By bringing the work of Mansfield and von Arnim together - including on matters of artistry, on mourning, on gardens, on female resistance - this book establishes shared preoccupations in ways that refine and extend our knowledge of writing in the period.

Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" was first published in 1898. It was instantly popular and has gone through numerous reprints ever since. This story is the main character Elizabeth’s diary, where she relates stories from her life, as she learns to tend to her garden. Whilst the novel has a strongly autobiographical tone, it is also very humorous and satirical, due to Elizabeth’s frequent mistakes and her idiosyncratic outlook on life. She comments on the beauty of nature and shares her view on society, looking down on the frivolous fashions of her time and writing "I believe all needlework and dressmaking is of the devil, designed to keep women from study." The book is the first in a series about the same character. Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), née Mary Annette Beauchamp, was a British novelist. Born in Australia, her family returned to England when she was three years old; and she was Katherine Mansfield’s cousin. She was first married to a Prussian aristocrat, the Graf von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and later to the philosopher Bertrand Russel’s older brother, Frank, whom she left a year later. She then had an affair with the publisher Alexander Reeves, a man thirty years her junior, and with H.G. Wells. Von Arnim moved a lot, living alternatively in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, before dying of influenza in South Carolina during the Second War. Elizabeth von Arnim was an active member of the European literary scene, and entertained many of her contemporaries in her Chalet Soleil in Switzerland. She even hired E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole as tutors for her five children. She is famous for her half-autobiographical, satirical novel "Elizabeth and her German Garden" (1898), as well as for "Vera" (1921), and "The Enchanted April" (1922).

The name Elizabeth von Arnim reveals and conceals so much of this often-forgotten author, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Married early to the German Count, Henning von Arnim, she became Elizabeth as she escaped to her German garden and found beauty amidst an oppressive existence.

Originally published in 1922, Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April is a charming and light-hearted novel about unlikely female friendships and the power of a blissful escape. Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Four mismatched women respond to an advert in The Times offering a beautiful medieval castle to rent on the Italian Riviera. Bashful Mrs Wilkins, cheerless Mrs Arbuthnot, widowed Mrs Fisher and socialite Lady Caroline Dester are each enchanted by the promise of ‘wisteria and sunshine’, and they arrive on the tranquil Mediterranean shores full of hope for a heavenly escape. Tensions mount between the group at first, but, as the idyllic spring days tick by, each is slowly transformed by the warm sunshine and unexpected company.

THE STORY: When two frustrated London housewives decide to rent a villa in Italy for a holiday away from their bleak marriages, they recruit two very different English women to share the cost and the experience. There, among the wisteria blossoms a

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield's influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.