The Collected Works of Elizabeth Von Arnim

Thursday 15th September

Born in the 1860’s in New Zealand, and named Maria, Elizabeth was brought up from the age of 3 in England.  Co-incidentally one of her cousins was Katherine Mansfield, another great writer.  Elizabeth married a Prussian count when she was in her early twenties and went to live in Germany.  It was an incredible culture shock.  She was awfully lonely and wrote a book under the name Elizabeth, called Elizabeth’s Secret Garden.  It was full of descriptions of flowers and scenery and with little autobiographical touches about how lonely and sad she felt.  She described her husband in her books as the man of wrath and she was unhappily married for years.  The book was a success and she wrote more, especially novels, often featuring young Englishwomen being uprooted and starting a new life in Germany.  All her books are quite delightful, often dealing with loneliness and rejection and women discovering themselves – and remember most of these were written a hundred years ago, when women’s lives were so different.

I bought her collected works on kindle; as they were out of copyright they cost nothing at all. I had bought probably her very best book ‘The Parson’s Wife’ a couple of years ago when kindle suggested it and was so impressed that I downloaded the collected works.  I have now read them all and not been disappointed once.

In later life when her husband died she re-married to the elder brother of Bertrand Russell and was actually a countess.  She lived to be ninety; a lesser famous authoress but a real revelation and a wonderful discovery for me.  I cannot recommend her highly enough.

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