Friday 6th February

I have just finished a really lovely book, and as is quite rare these days a book like no other I have read.  The author is Elizabeth von Arnim, who was born in Australia in 1866 and raised in England, she married a German. A Prussian Aristocrat, and had five children before she eventually left her domineering husband and returned to England.  By a strange co-incidence she was a cousin to Katherine Mansfield.  Most of her books which I will now look out are semi-autobigaphical as is ‘The Pastor’s Wife.’

The story is one of repressed female resistance in a male dominated world.  Ingeborg, our heroine is a Bishop’s daughter, the plain sister, the put-upon and largely ignored and yet inquisitive young woman who at 22 suddenly and completely out of character embarks on a foreign trip to Lucerne.  It is here she meets and is wooed by Robert Dremmel, a Prussian Pastor who she is enthralled and overwhelmed by, especially when he arranges a bethrothal which she barley understands and doesn’t have the moral courage to refuse.

She is swept away to a small farm in Prussia where she has to learn a new language and a whole new set of cultural behaviour.  She has six children which nearly kill her and only two survive.  And yet through it all she still has an innocence and a sense of wonder at nature, and a desire to learn and improve herself.  Her husband becomes more and more involved in his ‘research’ and then the neglected Ingeborg meets a famous artist who wants to paint her.

The book seems to get to the heart of both the woman’s feelings and the rigid German male-dominated social world she is forced to live in.  Beautifully written it is many ways a very modern novel.  I wonder what the Edwardians made of it when it was published in 1914.  All I know is I loved the book and felt quite sad to say goodbye to Ingeborg when the book ended.  Eight out of ten I would say.