Fraulein Schmidt And Mr Anstruther

Book 394: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

This enchanting novel tells the story of the love affair between Rose-Marie Schmidt and Roger Anstruther. A determined young woman of twenty-five, Rose-Marie is considered a spinster by the inhabitants of the small German town of Jena where she lives with her father, the Professor. To their homes comes Roger, an impoverished but well-born young Englishman who wishes to learn German: Rose-Marie and Roger fall in love. But the course of true love never did run smooth: distance, temperament and fortune divide them. We watch the ebb and flow of love between two very different people and see the witty and wonderful Rose-Marie get exactly what she wants.

Release date: March 6, 2014

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 400

Sample

In 1898 an anonymous novel called Elizabeth and her German Garden was published. Instantly it became extremely popular, reprinting eleven times in the first year and with twenty-one editions in print by May 1899. Wild surmise about the author’s name, nationality and sex accompanied its success.

As a pastoral idyll, Elizabeth and her German Garden is a euphoric hymn to nature in the romantic tradition. Its originality and peculiar talent rest on a character called “The Man of Wrath”, a benevolent caricature of Elizabeth’s husband. It is a novel of passionate rebellion against established demands, formal and private, made on a married woman even by a devoted husband.

In her garden Elizabeth is free and it is a tribute to her imaginative skill that E. M. Forster, after four months as tutor living in the place she described as inordinately full of flowers and all the beauties of nature, reported, “I couldn’t find the famous garden, the house appeared to be surrounded solely by paddocks and shrubberies.”

Part of Elizabeth’s freedom is to do with reading. Every path she walks, every tree she sits under, and every four-hour drive in horse and cart through snow and ice to picnic on the shores of the Baltic is accompanied by Thoreau, Keats, Spenser, Whitman or, in general, some inspired and ecstatic author. She did not have an intellectual or analytical mind and she well knew it but her reactions are naturally sharp. “If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond!” And she was impatiently sceptical of adroitly crafted writing; “Read two novels of So. Maugham, one of his first and his quite last. Clever as paint; and just about as unnourishing.”

“Elizabeth” was the nom de plume she used to guard her real identity. She was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, in 1866, where her father, Henry Beauchamp, set up a successful trade and shipping business. Katherine Mansfield was the daughter of Henry’s brother, Sir Harold Beauchamp, who became a New Zealand banker. Henry Beauchamp married Louey Lassiter after a whirlwind courtship. The marriage, “which from the slight acquaintance you have of each other, I could scarcely have thought possible”, Louey’s brother Fred wrote, led to fifty-two years of unconventional but loving partnership. At the age of three Elizabeth came to England with her three brothers, one sister and an adopted cousin.

The family lived in London, and for a time in Lausanne from where Henry’s new passions for music and travel could be indulged. Louey, when her husband was away, became independent and tremendously gay which set the pattern for Elizabeth’s inescapable belief, always apparent in her novels, that feminine talents for enjoyment were more than likely to be suppressed by the egotism of men.

At Miss Summerhayes’ school in Ealing, Elizabeth won a history prize “against all Ealing schools”, and a prize for organ-playing at the Royal College of Music. In 1889, when she was twenty-three, she set out for Europe with her father and there began the life which shaped her writing. In a musician’s house in Rome she met the widowed Count Henning August von Arnim, “dressed up to the eyes on his way to a ball at the Quirinal Palace”. Count von Arnim tracked the Beauchamps to Florence, Lake Como, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Bayreuth. Many years later Elizabeth wrote 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.”

Married in London, they moved into the formal, placid life of Berlin Junker society. Three daughters were born, amid scenes of rebellion from Elizabeth who did not wish for numerous children and found life among the laden tea tables of Berlin unspeakably dull.

Then Henning took her ninety miles north of Berlin to Nassenheide, his 8000 acre Pomeranian estate she had never seen. Here was freedom. The enormous seventeenth-century schloss had been empty for twenty-five years. Elizabeth abandoned husband and children to camp at Nassenheide. Builders and decorators began work but Elizabeth viewed the scene as “the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the greystone house of many gables where I spend my reluctant nights”.

Indoors her spirit was diminished, she lost the grace with which she viewed nature and was only saved, in her writing, by a sense of comedy. In her second book, The Solitary Summer, written in 1890, on a dark evening,

In the gloom of the big room I must have looked rather lonely, and smaller than usual buried in the capacious chair. When The Man of Wrath finally discovered me his face widened into an inappropriately cheerful smile.

“Well, my dear,” he said genially, “how very cold it is.”

“Did you come in to say that?” I asked.

“This tempest is very unusual in the summer,” he proceeded; to which I made no reply of any sort.

“I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. At least, I saw you, but it is so dark I thought you were a cushion.”

Now no woman likes to be taken for a cushion, so I rose and began to make tea with an icy dignity of demeanour.

Hugh Walpole tutored Elizabeth’s children at Nassenheide. Her temperament, he said, swung between tremendous energy, talk and wildly rumbustious games to a fiercely critical silence during the almost unendurably long and formal lunches where tutors and governesses were not expected to initiate conversation. Elizabeth was a capricious woman and she teased the tutors with the same caustic wit that appears in her writing. Walpole naively showed her his diary, which she returned with annotations (printed in italics):

June 4 Gautier’s “Balzac” in the Portraits a moddle of what such a thing should be. Wish I were sure how to spell that. Rather fancy it should be on the lines of noddle and toddle. Shall write to the “Academy” and ask. They like letters about things like that in their correspondence columns. It IS a splendid paper! June 6 Spent a pleasant but idle evening over The Serious Wooing—“the tipsy cake of literature” someone says—very daintily done—but Oh! this novel-reading! Must really give it up. My brain is mere whipped cream and jam. June 20 Played tennis and won two sets. See no point in mentioning the number of sets I didn’t win.

Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther was the fifth book Elizabeth

wrote at Nassenheide but first, on a March morning in 1905, her maid was asked to pack a suitcase of stout, plain clothes. Telling only Henning where she was going, Elizabeth took a job as an English speaking servant with a German family. She had a new identity: Miss Armstrong, governess to the von Arnim children, wishing to improve her German while on holiday.

She slept in an attic, mended and cleaned clothes, shopped and carried groceries, and discovered enough of German provincial life, where money was short, for her novel. Apparently Elizabeth survived her employment until the son of the house fell in love with her. Then, pretending her von Arnim charges were ill, she returned home.

In Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, Rose-Marie Schmidt is at no point able to run away from Jena, a small, lifeless town some distance from Berlin. Her father writes endless unpublishable books on Goethe, and takes in English students to make a little money. Rose-Marie’s stepmother toils over cooking and laundry, offering pessimistic epithets about her stepdaughter’s ineligibility.

At first the novel appears to be a conventional love story, written entirely in the form of Rose-Marie’s letters to Roger Anstruther who, an hour before he returns to England, professes his love for her and leaves her ecstatically and secretly engaged to marry him. Naturally Roger is not the same young man in England as he was in Jena. His father is socially ambitious. Roger is embarking on a career in the Foreign Office. He stays frequently at a house called Clinches, “from which letters do not seem to depart easily”.

Rose-Marie is the archetype of Elizabeth’s most attractive invention, the stoical romantic character. Her home is poor, her passions are for literature, and for the sturdy and undeniable beauty of the world. Her correspondence with Roger brilliantly finds out his character. He has all the trappings of superiority and between the comedy and the pathos surrounding Rose-Marie’s life, there constantly appears the contemporary woman’s dilemma between emotional compromise and independence.

When Roger criticizes Rose-Marie’s high-minded attitude to a vegetarian diet the family have embarked upon to save money, she replies:

Soon, I gather you expect I shall become a spiritualist and a social democrat; and quite soon after that I suppose you are sure I shall cut off my hair and go about in sandals. Well, I’ll tell you something that may keep you quiet: I’m tired of vegetarianism. It isn’t that I crave for fleshpots, for I shall continue as before to turn my back on them, on “the boiled and roast, The heated nose in face of ghost,” but I grudge the time it takes and the thought it takes. For the fortnight I have followed its precepts I have lived more entirely for my body than in any one fortnight of my life: It was all body. I could think of nothing else.

In some of Elizabeth’s books, the emotional rhetoric is humbug but the ending of Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther which, one reviewer claimed, would send hordes of young men travelling as fast as they could toward Jena, is true to Elizabeth’s own original spirit which was in no sense puritan but was fiercely sceptical of self-indulgent suffering. At one point in the novel, Rose-Marie challenges Roger Anstruther:

Do you, then, want to be pitied? I will pity you if you like, in so many carefully chosen words; but they will not be words from the heart but only, as the charming little child in the flat below us said of some speech that didn’t ring true to her quick ears, “from the tip of the nose”.

When Count von Arnim died, Elizabeth built the Chalet Soleil in Switzerland. By 1911 she had published seven novels, and her play, The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight, was a runaway success at the Haymarket. She was a romantic figure. H.G. Wells wrote to his long-suffering wife, Jane,

work and the gravity of life much alleviated yesterday by the sudden eruption of the bright little Countess von Arnim at one with a cheerful proposal to lunch with me & go for a walk … She talks very well, she knows The New Machiavelli by heart, & I think she’s a nice little friend to have … her conversation is free but her morals are strict (sad experience has taught her that if she much as thinks of anything she has a baby).

Elizabeth’s erratic and emotionally violent liaison with H.G. Wells lasted for two years, in competition with a frenetic social life, the attentions of a Nassenheide tutor called E.C. Stuart, and her five children for whom she left little time. She invited a stream of visitors to Chalet Soleil, and one morning, just after Christmas 1913, “climbing slowly up the ice-covered path to my front door, and slipping back a step in every two, wasn’t so much another guest as Doom”. The Earl Russell, whom she fell hopelessly in love with, announced: “You should have your path done.”

Years afterwards, Elizabeth recalled the day of his arrival.

And I said, motionless in my chair, hardly turning my bowed head, already sunk in acquiescence, “My path?”

And he said, “Cinders. That’s what you must put down.”

Such were his first words. Looking back I recognise them as characteristic …

After a disastrous marriage to Francis Russell, Elizabeth published Vera. The main character, Wemyss, is a husband who has driven his first wife to suicide by his bullying domestic tyrannies, and then proceeds to treat his second wife in exactly the same manner, in the same house. He has a monstrous personality but Elizabeth’s cousin, Katherine Mansfield, who greatly admired the novel, wrote in a letter to Dorothy Brett, “Have you never known a Wemyss? Oh, my dear, they are very plentiful! Few men are without a touch. And I certainly believe husbands and wives talk like that. Lord yes!” Bertrand Russell found Wemyss a cruel portrait of his elder brother, and said in his autobiography, “It caused me to give my children an emphatic piece of advice: ‘Do not marry a novelist’.”

A long and impossible love affair with the Cambridge editor of Granta magazine who was thirty years younger than her, the death of her favourite brother, and of Katherine Mansfield followed Elizabeth’s second marriage. Already in the First World War, Elizabeth’s children had suffered in various ways from being half-German. The worst of all was Felicitas, her musically talented youngest daughter who had been packed off in disgrace to a strict German college as a punishment for her expulsion from a school in Lausanne. Felicitas died in Germany, aged sixteen, cut off from her family by the war. In Christine, published under the pseudonym Alice Cholmondeley, Elizabeth wrote an anti-German propaganda novel, imagining the pseudonym would protect her second daughter, Trix, who was still in Germany. Bertrand Russell’s diary for May 1915 recorded: “Elizabeth expressed regret at the fact that her five German nephews in the war are all still alive. She is a true patriot. The Americans would like her.”

Elizabeth certainly deserved the comment. Even before the war, the tone she uses when writing about Germany and German characters is mordantly and maliciously cruel. In The Caravaners, which evolved from a damp, plodding holiday in Kent with E.M. Forster and other friends, Baron von Ottringel is a comically self-important husband who is treated with merciless ridicule. She is mutinously critical of German ways and habits in The Solitary Summer, written at Nassenheide, and in Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Rose-Marie’s charm survives in spite of her provincial background which is crammed full of heavy food and social ambition.

The Pastor’s Wife, written in 1912 and based on Elizabeth’s final romantic jaunt with H.G. Wells, parodies a German husband to whom the improvement of the soil of East Prussia signifies more than anything. But Elizabeth’s friendship with Bertrand Russell was closest during the period of his pacifist trials, and it seems from In The Mountains, published in 1920, that his views altered her feelings. It is a soul-searching novel, written around the question of forgiveness toward an Englishwoman who does not dare admit her earlier engagement to a German officer.

Elizabeth became a rather eccentric-looking figure. Katherine Mansfield described her as “something between a Bishop and a Fly”. When war against Germany broke out for the second time in her life, she was living in the South of France. With her house commandeered as a billet, her garden full of guns, and having failed to extract her desperate granddaughter from Germany, Elizabeth had all but one of her numerous dogs put to death and left for America. On 13 January 1941 her diary records: “Dr Carroll came about my arthritic right hand and drank my health, he having discovered I was E. of the G.G. Read Bielschovsky on Goethe. I find it deeply interesting. Forty-five years ago, when H. gave it to me, it bored me, and I didn’t read it. So I’m improving!” On 9 February, she died.

In a letter to John Middleton Murry, after the death of Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth wrote,

I am spiritually ill at ease with you too, also with Bertie Russell. From this it would seem that all highly intelligent people make me uncomfortable, but it isn’t so, for I feel most exquisitely comfortable and in complete possession of myself when I’m with Santayana. If only I hadn’t been so much afraid of Katherine! I so longed for her not to mind me too much, not to find me out completely.

Elizabeth’s novels determinedly and sometimes cruelly expose emotional oppression, and though the oppressor is almost always a man, her own demands for power were not entirely the rebellion of the independent woman. She was uncertain of herself, as E.M. Forster recognised:

To be liked, to really be liked, is probably her deepest inspiration, and when she brushes aside one’s cleverness and exclaims, ‘But haven’t you a heart?’ It perhaps isn’t tactics entirely. May this explain her extraordinary power? It does seem odd that one should be so anxious to please such a person, for she isn’t distinguished and she’s always ungrateful. Yet one is anxious … To want to be loved does pay.

A Times Literary Supplement reviewer of Father, one of her later novels, declared with absolute accuracy, “What Elizabeth does not know about egotists and those who submit to, or rebel against them is not worth knowing.”

Xandra Hardie, Metton 1982

Jena, Nov. 6.

DEAR ROGER,—This is only to tell you that I love you, supposing you should have forgotten it by the time you get to London. The letter will follow you by the train after the one you left by, and you will have it with your breakfast the day after to-morrow. Then you will be eating the marmalade Jena could not produce, and you’ll say, “What a very indiscreet young woman to write first.” But look at the “Dear Roger,” and you’ll see I’m not so indiscreet after all. What could be more sober? And you’ve no idea of all the nice things I could have put instead of that, only I wouldn’t. It is a most extraordinary thing that this time yesterday we were on the polite-conversation footing, you, in your beautiful new German, carefully calling me gnädiges Fräulein at every second breath, and I making appropriate answers to the Mr. Anstruther who in one bewildering hour turned for me into Dear Roger. Did you always like me so much?—I mean, love me so much? My spirit is rather unbendable as yet to the softnesses of these strange words, stiff for want of use, so forgive a tendency to go round them. Don’t you think it is very wonderful that you should have been here a whole year, living with us, seeing me every day, practising your German on me—oh, wasn’t I patient?—and never have shown the least sign that I could see of thinking of me or of caring for me at all except as a dim sort of young lady who assisted her stepmother in the work of properly mending and feeding you? And then an hour ago, just one hour by that absurd cuckoo-clock here in this room where we said good-bye, you suddenly turned into something marvellous, splendid, soul-thrilling—well, into Dear Roger. It is so funny that I’ve been laughing, and so sweet that I’ve been crying. I’m so happy that I can’t help writing, though I do think it rather gushing—loathsome word—to write first. But then you strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet, and how can I keep altogether quiet? You, then, my poor Roger, must be the one to listen. Do you know what Jena looks like to-night? It is the most dazzling place in the world, radiant with promise, shining and dancing with all sorts of little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps being lit in people’s rooms down the street, but that look to me extraordinarily like stars of hope come out, in defiance of nature and fog, to give me a glorious welcome. You see, I’m new, and they know it. I’m not the Rose-Marie they’ve twinkled down on from the day I was born till to-night. She was a dull person: a mere ordinary, dull person, climbing doggedly up the rows of hours each day set before her, doggedly doing certain things she was told were her daily duties, equally doggedly circumventing certain others, and actually supposing she was happy. Happy? She was not. She was most wretched. She was blind and deaf. She was asleep. She was only half a woman. What is the good or the beauty of anything, alive or dead, in the world, that has not fulfilled its destiny? And I never saw that before. I never saw a great many things before. I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. Love passed through this house to-day, this house that other people think is just the same dull place it was yesterday, and behold—well, I won’t grow magnificent, and it is what you do if you begin a sentence with “Behold.” But really there’s a splendour—oh well. And as for this room where you—where I—where we—well, I won’t grow sentimental either, though now I know, I who always scoffed at it, how fatally easy a thing it is to be. That is, supposing one has had great provocation; and haven’t I? Oh, haven’t I?

I had got. as far as that when your beloved Professor Martens came in, very much agitated because he had missed you at the station, where he had been to give you a send-off. And what do you think he said? He said, why did I sit in this dreary hole without a lamp, and why didn’t I draw the curtains, and shut out the fog and drizzle. Fog and drizzle? It really seemed too funny. Why, the whole sky is shining. And as for the dreary hole—gracious heavens, is it possible that just being old made him not able to feel how the air of the room was still quivering with all you said to me, with all the sweet, wonderful, precious things you said to me? The place was full of you. And there was your darling coffee-cup still where you had put it down, and the very rug we stood on still all ruffled up.

“I think it’s a glorious hole,” I couldn’t help saying.

“De gustibus,” said he, indulgently; and he stretched himself in the easy-chair—the one you used to sit in—and said he should miss young Anstruther.

“Shall you?” said I.

“Fräulein Rose-Marie,” said he, solemnly, “he was a most intelligent young man. Quite the most intelligent young man I have ever had here.”

“Really?” said I, smiling all over my silly face.

And so of course you were, or how would you ever have found out that I—well, that I’m not wholly unlovable?

Yours quite, quite truly,

R.-M.

Jena, Nov. 7.

DEAR ROGER,—You left on Tuesday night—that’s yesterday—and you’ll get to London on Thursday morning—that’s to-morrow—and first you’ll want to wash yourself, and have breakfast—please notice my extreme reasonableness—and it will be about eleven before you are able to begin to write to me. I shan’t get the letter till Saturday, and to-day is only Wednesday, so how can I stop myself from writing to you again, I should like to know? I simply can’t. Besides, I want to tell you all the heaps of important things I would have told you yesterday, if there had been time when you asked me in that amazing sudden way if I’d marry you.

Do you know I’m poor? Of course you do. You couldn’t have lived with us a year and not seen by the very sort of puddings we have that we are poor. Do you think that anybody who can help it would have dicker Reis three times a week? And then if we were not, my stepmother would never bother to take in English young men who want to study German; she would do quite different sorts of things, and we should have different sorts of puddings—proud ones, with Schlagsahne on their tops—and two servants instead of one, and I would never have met you. Well, you know then that we are poor; but I don’t believe you know how poor. When girls here marry, their parents give them, as a matter-of-course, house-linen enough to last them all their lives, furniture enough to furnish all their house, clothes enough for several generations, and so much a year besides. Then, greatly impoverished, they spend the evenings of their days doin. . .