Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Book 393: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth Jane Howard

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

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. -

Release date: March 13, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

In 1889 Henry Beauchamp took his youngest daughter May to Italy. He expected his wife to join them in a week or so when he
would be able to abandon the exigencies of chaperoning a young girl and—leaving the women to their own devices—get down to
some really serious sightseeing on his own—a practice to which he had become increasingly addicted since he had come from
Australia and settled in Europe. Mary Annette—the family called her May—had acquitted herself well at school where she won
a prize for History and also at the Royal College of Music where she had won a prize for organ playing. She was twenty-three,
and had earlier been described by her father, who had only lately begun to appreciate her, as “bright, industrious and good”.


Mr Beauchamp’s sightseeing itinerary—even with a young and giddy daughter addicted to cake shops—was formidable. They visited
Milan, Genoa, Pisa and finally Rome, looking at everything that was to be seen and only sat down when they took Italian lessons
or paid calls upon the people to whom they had introductions. May’s musical ability must have been out of the ordinary as
one of the introductions was given her by Sir George Groves of the Royal College to a famous Roman musician in whose house,
after calling, they spent the entire evening. “Just as we were going to bed ‘Il Conte’ appeared dressed up to the eyes on his way to a ball at the Quirinal Palace and staid over an hour.”
(Mr Beauchamp’s Journal)


“II Conte” was the German Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin who was travelling to get over the death of his wife
and child who had died the previous year. He was immediately attracted to May, and when, a month after their meeting he heard
her playing Bach at organ recitals in the American Church in Rome, he was determined to marry her. There followed a brief,
but intensely romantic courtship as von Arnim pursued the Beauchamps in Italy, in Switzerland and Germany, eventually persuading
the family to take rooms in Bayreuth. Many years later Elizabeth was to write to Hugh Walpole, “my first courted me in Bayreuth
and there’s not a tree within five miles that I haven’t been kissed under”.


By the end of July their engagement was official: von Arnim did not want to wait long for the marriage, but he said that it
was absolutely necessary for May to learn German, in order to manage the servants. She therefore spent three months in Dresden
with her mother, having a lesson every day. The marriage took place the following February in London, and after a honeymoon
in Paris, they settled to upper-class German life in Berlin, which for May (who at this point seems to have been translated
into Elizabeth) was a period of stultifying dullness. She was homesick for England and her family: she somewhat mutinously
bore three daughters in as many years (von Arnim was desperate for a son); she paid and received calls, went to and gave parties,
received instruction in dress and etiquette—and languished.


Then, in 1896, she accompanied her husband on one of his regular visits to his enormous Pomeranian estate, Nassenheide, ninety
miles north of Berlin. The estate was centred upon a large seventeenth-century schloss that had once been a convent and had
been unoccupied for the previous twenty-five years. It was surrounded by a vast, rambling and derelict garden. The moment that she saw it, Elizabeth knew that she wanted to live there. Here was freedom and
peace; a natural isolation from the soul-destroying social life of Berlin—a wilderness of beauty to be ordered and enjoyed.
In spite of some difficulty in persuading von Arnim (who had spent practically all his life in cities, was fifteen years older
than she and a Prussian to boot), she got his partial agreement to their living there—at least for the summer months.


Elizabeth and Her German Garden was published two years later, and opens with her account of the first blissful weeks from April to June when she was alone
there, supposedly superintending the painting and papering of the house, but in fact spending every waking moment in the wild
garden, with its bird cherries, lilacs, wild flowers and four great clumps of pale silvery-pink paeonies. Her meals of salad
and bread and tea—with the occasional tiny pigeon to save her from starvation—were brought to her in the garden on trays,
and she spent her reluctant nights alone in the old house with her door locked and a dinner bell by her as a weapon against
fear.


This first book, published anonymously, was an instant success, reprinting eleven times in the first year, and with twenty-one
editions printed by May 1899. It received a good press on the whole, although one reviewer grumbled that “even the amateur
gardener will be disappointed, for he will find therein no tips as to the best methods of grafting apples, or of destroying
vermin…” and the Spectator, in the person of Quiller-Couch, complained that he found her “not only selfish, but quite inhumanly so and her mind … of
that order which finds a smart self-satisfaction in proclaiming how thoroughly it is dominated by self.” The Derby Mercury-felt sure that the anonymous author was a gentleman, “betraying his sex by more than one sign” but on the whole The Times—in spite of its rather patronising attitude— conveys the most general contemporary response to the book.


The anonymous author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden has written a very bright little book—genial, humorous, perhaps a little fantastic and wayward here and there, but full of
bright glimpses of nature and sprightly criticisms of life. Elizabeth is the English wife of a German husband, who finds and
makes for herself a delightful retreat from the banalities of life in a German provincial town by occupying and beautifying
a deserted convent, the property of her husband, in one of the Baltic provinces. Her gardening experiences are somewhat primitive
and unsophisticated, but this is, no doubt, only a harmless literary artifice, for the charm of the book lies not in its horticultural
record, but in its personal atmosphere, its individuality of sentiment, its healthy sympathy with nature and outdoor life,its
shrewd but kindly appreciations of character and social circumstance. There is a pleasant sub-acid flavour in some of Elizabeth’s
pages which show that she could do better if she chose; but she is seldom ungenerous except in the remarks about nurses and
their ways which she puts into the mouth of her husband, and is never dull.


The book—described rather loosely as a novel—is an extraordinary piece of work. It has an idyllic quality; Elizabeth’s joy and excitement about transforming a wilderness
into a garden is seconded only by her desire simply to revel in the place—to become part of a great and continuing pastoral
romance—of the seasons, the times of the day, of the weather, of all the amazing machinery of nature that provided such infinite
variation. Her enthusiasm is matched by her self-confessed ignorance: she buys ten pounds of ipomaea seed — sows it in eleven beds and “round nearly every tree, and waited in great agitation for the promised paradise
to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.” It did not matter, she had the wild flowers—the old lawns that had
become meadows filled with “every pretty sort of weed”. The opening of the book contains the ecstasy of a release that every
woman who has experienced marriage and motherhood will recognise and many will envy: the opportunity to be alone, to have
space and privacy with no demands made upon her, to eat and sleep and read when she pleased, to have silence and solitude and the time to be with herself—all
things that no doubt people like Quiller-Couch would regard as infra dig, selfish, unbecoming and unnecessary for a woman.
But a singular aspect of this book is the author’s determination to be something more than a good German wife and mother,
and it is this quality, set against the more traditionally romantic hymn to nature that gives the work its unique flavour.


In the midst of the first few weeks of this solitary paradise, her husband arrives to rebuke her for not having written. She
says that she has been too happy to think of writing. This, unsurprisingly, does not reassure him—he thinks it extraordinary
that she should be happy in his absence and the absence of the children. She shows him her beloved lilacs and he remarks that
they badly need pruning, she offers him her salad and toast supper “but nothing appeased the Man of Wrath, and he said he
would go straight back to the neglected family”. Henceforward, in her book, he is known as the Man of Wrath, and her relationship
with him (she was in conflict with his private as well as his formal demands) adds an original dimension to the book. There
seems to be no doubt but that he was devoted to her—found her fascinating and rewarding company, and was only occasionally
put out by her eccentricities—her spending her pin money on artificial manure, for instance. Her portrait of the Man of Wrath
is affectionately satirical—she teases him, but he comes well out of it—she feeds the liberal, eccentric aspect of his nature,
but she has the rest of him to contend with, and this she does throughout with a most daring tact.*

Her children, called throughout the April, May and June baby respectively, make welcome appearances. Here is Elizabeth about the April baby and a governess.


… Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is always perpetually scenting a scene, and is always ready to bring whole batteries
of discretion and tact and good taste to bear on us … I would take my courage in both hands and ask her to go… but unfortunately
the April baby adores her and is sure that never was anyone so beautiful before. She comes every day with fresh accounts of
the splendours of her wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats. In common with most governesses she has
a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared one day at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation,
having achieved it after much struggling with the aid of a lead pencil and much love. Miss Jones put her in a corner for impertinence.
I wonder why governesses are so unpleasant? The Man of Wrath says it is because they are not married. I would add that the
strain of continually having to set an example must surely be very great. It is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be
a warning than an example …


The garden is her escape from domestic duties; indeed, with the exception of the “white and yellow library”, the house is
hardly described at all. It is the garden that is her element—the place where she can breathe and live, meditate, dream, plan
and above all, read. Elizabeth was a voracious reader. Books accompanied her everywhere, and it would seem that during those
early years at Nassenheide she was, perhaps unconsciously, preparing herself for her subsequent career as a writer (by the
end of her life she had published twenty-two books). But even her dauntless spirit was sometimes circumscribed by the rules
of her society.


I wish. . .