The New Yorker:

In “The Enchanted April,” by Elizabeth von Arnim, four Englishwomen are transformed by a temporary loss of self.

By Claire Jarvis

Recognizing oneself as one really is and not as one appears to others is the major theme of Elizabeth von Arnim’s work. Von Arnim, an Australian brought up in England, married her first husband, the Count von Arnim, in 1891, and had three daughters in quick succession (the couple eventually had five children). The family then moved to Pomerania, and the experience formed the basis of her first, incredibly popular novel, “Elizabeth and Her German Garden,” from 1898, which details the retreat of an upper-class woman from the concerns of domestic life. Rather than focussing on the élite society in which von Arnim moved, the book turns a precise, clinical eye on how personality is shaped by one’s environment. By the end, its heroine has undergone a radical transformation and asserted her independence. Von Arnim herself separated from her husband, and when he died, in 1908, she began a long affair with H. G. Wells, only to remarry and then quickly leave that husband, the second Earl Russell. She was a woman unconcerned with social niceties despite belonging to a world that depended heavily on them. Her novels, underneath their light exteriors, are quietly but unmistakably subversive.

“The Enchanted April,” which von Arnim published in 1922, follows her earlier work in centering on the minutiae of women’s daily lives, and in particular on how emotions subtly shift in new, unfamiliar places. The plot is simple: after reading an advertisement for the rental of a “Small medieval Italian Castle” in the Times, two middle-class English women pool their money to go to Italy for the month of April. (“To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” the advertisement croons.) To make the trip more affordable, the women—their names are Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot—invite two others. Lady Caroline Dester, beautiful, rich, unmarried, and bored, joins on an impulse borne of “a longing to get away from everybody she had ever known.” The last of the quartet is Mrs. Fisher, an older widow whose father was a famous Victorian critic.

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