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BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN". Elizabeth Von Arnim 1866-1941
Release date: January 23, 2008
Publisher: Wildhern Press
Print pages: 352
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The Caravaners
Elizabeth von Arnim
(1866-1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, and brought up in England. Travelling in Italy with her
father in 1889, she met her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. They were married in London the following
year and lived in Berlin. After five years of marriage the von Arnims moved to their family estate, Nassenheide, in Pomerania:
Elizabeth’s experience and deep love of Nassenheide were to be wittily encapsulated in her first and most famous novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898. The twenty-one books she then went on to write were signed “By the author of Elizabeth and
Her German Garden”, and later simply “By Elizabeth”.
Elizabeth von Arnim gave birth to four daughters and a son, whose tutors at Nassenheide included E.M. Forster and Hugh Walpole.
Her idyllic Prussian days were, however, to be abruptly ended when, in 1908, debt forced the von Arnims to sell the estate.
They moved to England, and in 1910 Count von Arnim died. Buying a site in Switzerland Elizabeth built the Chateau Soleil where
she worked on her book and entertained such friends as H.G. Wells (with whom she had an affair), Katherine Mansfield (her
cousin), John Middleton Murry and Frank Swinnerton. On the outbreak of war she managed to escape to England, but she was unable
to rescue her daughter Felicitas, who died in Germany. In 1916 Elizabeth von Arnim married Francis, second Earl Russell, brother
of Bertrand Russell, whom she had met three years previously. This proved to be a disastrous union: in the first year of marriage
Elizabeth ran away to America and in 1919 the couple finally separated.
A greatly admired literary figure of her time, described by Alice Meynell as “one of the three finest wits of her day”, Elizabeth
spent her later years in Switzerland, London, and the French Riviera where she wrote her autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). On the outbreak of the Second World War she moved to America, where she died two years later at the age of seventy-five.
Of her novels Virago publishes Vera, Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Enchanted April, The Pastor’s Wife, and The Caravaners.
“One of the cleverest and most amusing stories of the year,” declared Punch, when The Caravaners was published in 1909. Elizabeth von Arnim’s witty account of an ill-assorted group of upper-class people grappling with
the hardships of the open road was an immediate success—it even spawned a new literary genre known as “Wayside Wisdom”. The
narrator of the story is one Baron Otto Von Ottringe, a pompous, humourless and stingy scion of Prussian gentry. He joins
a caravan tour of Kent and Sussex, attracted by its cheapness, and is disgusted by the laxity of English manners. Comic tension
is provided by the Baron’s increasing unpopularity among his fellow-travellers, and his own failure to notice it.
Elizabeth excelled at creating horribly hilarious male characters, and the bone-headed Baron is one of her very best. “Why
are the men in your books always disagreeable?” the writer George Moore once asked her. “Is the disagreeable man an integral
part of your style, just as the fat woman was a part of Rubens’s?” In fact, the disagreeable man was an integral part of Elizabeth’s
life. As a child, she had seen her mother blossom during the absences of her temperamental father, and she was always to assume
that women could only enjoy themselves fully when their menfolk were elsewhere. Her books are full of women oppressed and
constricted by the yokes of daughterhood and marriage, and she was keenly aware of the powerlessness of an intelligent woman in a male-dominated world. She used her pen
as an instrument of revenge, and the men in her life are often skewered in the pages of her fiction. Francis, Earl Russell,
her pathologically disturbed second husband, is so brilliantly and mercilessly immortalised in Vera that his brother, Bertrand Russell, later advised his children never to marry a novelist.
Baron Otto epitomises the kind of German man Elizabeth scorned and in The Caravaners she gleefully subjects him to all kinds of humiliations. It is probably the most purely funny novel she ever wrote, but there
is more than a hint of savagery beneath the humour. It is easy to see why Hugh Walpole pronounced it “so cruel that you blush
for her a little”.
Elizabeth was a dainty, ethereal woman of legendary personal charm. She had a voracious desire to be loved, and always managed
to surround herself with worshippers, but she never could resist teasing, and few of these infatuated people escaped the lash
of her wicked tongue. Teppi Backe, a young German governess, was amazed on her first day in the von Arnim nursery when her
employer suddenly erupted into the room, screaming like a fury, and whacked the baby with a hairbrush. That same evening,
however, she saw the sunny side of Elizabeth, and was enslaved. “A cream coloured gown wrapped her small body,” Teppi gushed
in her memoirs, “and a pearl necklace hung round her beautiful neck and was woven through the high piled brown hair. Beneath
the flowing gown could be seen shoes which would probably fit Cinderella.”
Hugh Walpole, writing after Elizabeth’s death in 1941, paid handsome tribute to her warmth and kindness, but did not gloss
over the harsher aspects of her character. “I had a horrible summer,” he said, recalling his period as tutor to the von Arnim
children.
When she was cruel, she was very cruel, and I was so miserable, so stupid and so homesick that I used to snivel in the cold
dark passages of the Schloss and ache for home. I doubt whether any experience in my life did me more good, but dear me, did
I suffer!
He was, admittedly, rather silly to show Elizabeth the pretentious diary he was keeping—which she never let him forget—but
the whole episode illustrates Elizabeth’s penchant for attacking people who were not equipped to answer back. This is very
evident in the most acidly satirical parts of The Caravaners.
The ménage Walpole joined at Nassenheide, out in the wilds of Pomerania, was a curious one. Elizabeth had been born in New
Zealand and brought up in England, and she was already a famous writer. To her stolid, countrified German neighbours, she
must have seemed dangerously exotic. Her husband, Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, was a Prussian aristocrat, struggling
to farm the dry soil of his ancestral acres and pay off his father’s debts. Henning was familiar to readers of his wife’s
best-loved novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden as “The Man of Wrath”, the affectionate but damping voice of authority.
Elizabeth met Henning in Rome in 1889, when she was 23-year-old Mary Annette Beauchamp, travelling with her parents. Henning
was a widower of forty, on the look-out for a suitable wife. Young Mary certainly did not conform to prevailing Teutonic standards
of “suitability”, but he was captivated. At the summit of the Duomo in Florence, he proposed to Elizabeth, in words which
have more than a suspicion of Baron Otto about them: “All girls like love. It is very agreeable. You will like it too. You
shall marry me and see.”
After they were married, however, Elizabeth felt stifled in Berlin society, where a woman was expected to know her place and provide endless children. Her first three daughters were born within three years, and she later complained that she got
pregnant if Henning so much as blew his nose in the same room. They were to have a total of five children—four girls and one
boy—in what Elizabeth referred to as her “wild career of unbridled motherhood”. In 1890, Henning moved his family to Nassenheide,
and Elizabeth revelled in the outdoor life. This was to be the “German Garden” of her first novel. “What a happy woman I am,”
she exclaimed, “with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!”
Elizabeth loved Nassenheide, but she became increasingly exasperated by Germany and the Germans. Above all, The Caravaners is a virulently anti-German book—the Baron regards England with the eyes of a potential invader, and declares that he never
wants to see it again unless he is marching at the head of his regiment. By 1907, Elizabeth knew that war between her two
countries was possible, and she was looking for ways to return to England with her children. There was also increasing tension
in her relationship with Henning, aggravated by financial worries. Longing for a respite, Elizabeth seized on the idea of
a caravan holiday in the Home Counties.
An advertisement for vans and horses in The Times fired her imagination. At that time, it was almost unheard of for a lady to rough it like a tinker, but she was not one to
care about the more pointless conventions of her era. “I can’t tell you yet what we’re going to do,” she wrote to her daughter
Evi, “But pray for fine weather, my child, for if it’s wet heaven knows what will become of us.” In the event, it was the
wettest August on record, and the caravaners spent most of their time shivering over a cauldron of rain-splashed porridge.
“Elizabeth, to whom the simplicities had seemed so alluring while she was lapped in the elaborate comforts of home, felt that
she had perhaps plunged into too many of them, too thoroughly,” her daughter Liebet remembered afterwards.
On the few fine days, however, Elizabeth was in tearing spirits, falling in love with every thatched cottage she saw, and
soaking up the blessed English atmosphere. They were a motley crew—Elizabeth, her daughters and two women friends lived in
the vans, and the young men, (who included E.M. Forster, another ex-tutor at Nassenheide) slept in tents. The attention they
attracted along the way was not always complimentary. When necessary, Elizabeth pulled out her title and reputation to obtain
decent campsites. Forster cherished the memory of her dancing a highland fling with a hospitable vicar.
All this was simmering in Elizabeth’s mind when she came to write The Caravaners. First, she had to find a plausible reason for her self-indulgent Baron to submit himself to such discomfort. The reason is,
quite simply, sex appeal. The von Ottringe’s neighbour, Frau von Eckthum, is an appealing little widow, who keeps the Baron
in a constant ferment of attraction and disapproval. Most of Elizabeth’s novels contain a tiny, enchanting and rather anarchic
heroine. This was how she saw herself, thin silk stockings, cooing voice and all. How can the Baron resist, when she paints
such an alluring picture of nights under the stars?
Frau von Eckthum’s less appealing sister, Mrs Menzies-Legh, unpatriotically married to an Englishman, is the brains behind
this holiday. She has assembled an eccentric group of wayfarers, and the Baron begins to have regrets as soon as he sets eyes
on the two young men of the party. They are, of course, an outrage to Prussian sensibilities, with their baggy clothes, mild
manners and progressive ideas. In particular, Elizabeth has great fun pitching the Baron against Mr Jellaby, who is a socialist
MP.
The first half of the book is broad farce. Away from his starchy home surroundings, the Baron is a ludicrous figure. The smoked
ox-tongue he has instructed his wife to hide away in their caravan for private consumption falls into the mud. He discovers
he is expected to lead his horse in all weathers, and go for more than two hours at a stretch without food. “This was not
a holiday,” he declares, “It was privation combined with exposure.”
The notion of upper-class people fending for themselves was a novelty for Edwardian readers, and they were fascinated by the
detailed descriptions of cooking and cleaning in such amusingly primitive conditions. Nowadays, the most interesting element
in the novel is its underlying debate about women’s rights. Eighty years on, the points Elizabeth makes are still relevant—she
goes right to the root of the problem. To say that Baron Otto is a male chauvinist pig is to put it mildly. “The perfect woman
does not talk at all,” he says. “Who wants to hear her?” His stout, submissive wife Edelgard is only audible when she agrees
with him. He is a monster of selfishness, even blaming his first wife for being knocked down by a carriage and inconsiderately
dying. When Mrs Menzies-Legh rejoices in “freedom from the ministrations of menials”, Otto assumes she means that the women
in the party will do all the work. After all, what is a woman for, if not to provide meals and babies when wanted? Elizabeth
captures his absurd sense of injury with deadly accuracy—he simply cannot believe that the females are not expected to sacrifice
themselves for his comfort.
“A reasonable man,” maintains the Baron, “will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every point of
view before consenting to follow them, or allowing her to follow them.” Elizabeth must have heard statements like this issuing
from beneath many a Prussian moustache, and her comedy is tinged with the bitterness of experience: “Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem.
It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood.” The
withdrawal of love is an ancient male weapon. Poor Edelgard is not the first woman to be emotionally blackmailed in this way,
nor will she be the last.
Red Mr Jellaby, with his unfailing consideration for the ladies, serves as an excellent foil for the Baron’s grotesque sexism.
One of the most significant exchanges in the book takes place when Jellaby is cooking sausages over the camp fire, and the
Baron is holding an umbrella over the frying pan. The task is so unpleasant, he suggests they tell Edelgard to do it. Jellaby
is outraged. “Monstrous,” he says.
“Why should she cook for us? Why should she come out in the wet to cook for us? Why should any woman cook for fourteen years
without interruption?”
“She did it joyfully, Jellaby, for the comfort and sustenance of her husband, as every virtuous woman should.”
“I think,” said he, “It would choke me.”
“What would choke you?”
“Food produced by the unceasing labour of my wife. Why should she be treated as a servant, when she gets neither wages nor
the privilege of giving notice and going away?”
Such dangerous notions are dismissed as nonsense by the Baron, but to his consternation, they begin to work on his wife. Edelgard
shortens her skirts and loosens her hair, copying the pagan appearances of Frau von Eckthum and Mrs Menzies-Legh. She becomes
boyish and fleet of foot, and begins to lose weight. This is a little exaggerated, since it is all supposed to happen in one
week, but the transformation is deeply symbolic from Elizabeth’s point of view. Like herself, Edelgard is shedding her German qualities and embracing the freedom of England.
Elizabeth equated fat with stupidity and weakness, and despised fat people. When her daughters showed signs of chubbiness
as small children, she made them run round the garden until they were breathless. Edelgard cannot be properly liberated until
her clothes have begun to hang on her.
And the loss of her admirable German embonpoint is only the tip of the iceberg, as the Baron discovers.
“I gently began ‘Dear wife – ’ and was going on when she interrupted me.
‘Dear husband’ she said, actually imitating me, ‘I know what you are going to say. I always know what you are going to say.
I know all the things you ever can or ever do say.’
She paused a moment, and then added in a firm voice, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘By heart.’”
To sustain a novel with such a preposterous character at its centre is quite a task. At first, the Baron is tolerable, and
even strangely likeable, because he is the begetter of such delightful comedy. However, Elizabeth is not content to leave
it at that. Towards the end, the tone sharpens, and the “cruelty” noticed by Hugh Walpole comes into play. Although it is
richly deserved, the ostracism of the Baron is painful to witness. “It was very odd,” he muses, as he recalls innocently chasing
his fellow travellers round a dance floor, “It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up, they went down; when I
went down, they went up.” For a few lines, he has an almost tragic stature. Frau von Eckthum is overheard explaining why her
sister tries to be nice to him: “She says … that his loneliness, whether he knows it or not, makes her ache.” Elizabeth could
not allow her readers to ache for someone so unworthy, and the tone is quickly forced back into hilarity.
The Caravaners was begun at Nassenheide early in 1908. Financial pressure was mounting, and the estate was put up for sale. Henning wanted
to move to his mother’s house, Schlagenthin—a “mausoleum” according to Elizabeth. Eventually, she left her husband to negotiate
the sale, and set up house at Broadclyst, in Devon. Here, she continued to work on her novel. Despite the upheaval, the anxieties
over money and the loss of the “German Garden” which had made her famous, she was in sparkling form when she wrote The Caravaners. The vital ingredient in all her work is fun, and here she is at her most sprightly and irreverent. Occasionally, the acid
bite of her humour makes one wince instead of smile, but the overall effect is as exhilarating as a stiff sea breeze. In his
generous obituary, the devoted Hugh Walpole placed her alongside Jane Austen as a writer of comedy, and added: “English literature
is not so crammed with wits that it can spare Elizabeth.”
Kate Saunders, London,1998
IN June this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer had really come at last. The effect was to make us
feel our flat (which is really a very nice well-planned one on the second floor at the corner overlooking the cemetery, and
not at all stuffy) but a dull place after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was the year of the
fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of
August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on trips into the country in June. My wife therefore suggested
that we should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a radius of, say, from five to ten miles round
our town, and visit one after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to Storchwerder and farm their own
estates. “In this way,” said she, “we shall get much fresh air at little cost.”
After a time I agreed. Not immediately, of course, for a reasonable man will take care to consider the suggestions made by
his wife from every point of view before consenting to follow them or allowing her to follow them. Women do not reason: they have instincts; and instincts would land them in strange places sometimes if it
were not that their husbands are there to illuminate the path for them and behave, if one may so express it, as a kind of
guiding and very clever glow-worm. As for those who have not succeeded in getting husbands, the flotsam and jetsam, so to
speak, of their sex, all I can say is God help them.
There was nothing, however, to be advanced against Edelgard’s idea in this case; on the contrary, there was much to commend
it. We should get fresh air; we should be fed (well fed, and, if we chose, to excess, but of course we know how to be reasonable);
and we should pay nothing. As Major of the artillery regiment stationed at Storchwerder I am obliged anyhow to keep a couple
of horses (they are fed at the cost of the regiment,) and I also in the natural order of things have one of the men of my
battalion in my flat as servant and coachman, who costs me little more than his keep and may not give me notice. All, then,
that was wanting was a vehicle, and we could, as Edelgard pointed out, easily borrow our Colonel’s waggonette for a few afternoons,
so there was our equipage complete, and without spending a penny.
The estates round Storchwerder are big, and we found on counting up that five calls would cover the entire circle of our country
acquaintance. There might have been a sixth, but for reasons with which I entirely concurred my dear wife did not choose to
include it. Lines have to be drawn, and I do not think an altogether bad definition of a gentleman or a lady would be one who draws them. Indeed, Edelgard was in some doubt as to whether there should be even five, a member of
the five—not in this case actually the land-owner but the brother of the widowed lady owning it, who lives with her and looks
after her interests—being a person we neither of us can care much about, because he is not only unsound politically, with
a decided leaning disgraceful in a man of his birth and which he hardly takes any trouble to hide towards those views the
middle classes and Socialist sort of people call (God save the mark) enlightened, but he is also either unable or unwilling—Edelgard
and I could never make up our minds which—to keep his sister in order. Yet to keep the woman one is responsible for in order
whether she be sister, or wife, or mother, or daughter, or even under certain favourable conditions aunt—a difficult race
sometimes, as may be seen by the case of Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhilgel, of whom perhaps more later—is really quite easy. It is
only a question of beginning in time, as you mean to go on in fact, and of being especially firm whenever you feel internally
least so. It is so easy that I never could understand the difficulty. It is so easy that when my wife at this point brought
me my eleven o’clock bread and ham and butter and interrupted me by looking over my shoulder, I smiled up at her, my thoughts
still running on this theme, and taking the hand that put down the plate said, “Is it not, dear wife?”
“Is what not?” she asked,—rather stupidly I thought, for she had read what I had written to the end; then without giving me time to reply she said, “Are you not going to write the story of our experiences in England after
all, Otto?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“To lend round among our relations next winter?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“Then had you not better begin?”
“Dear wife,” said I, “it is what I am doing.”
“Then,” said she, “do not waste time going off the rails.”
And sitting down in the window she resumed her work of enlarging the armholes of my shirts.
This, I may remark, was tartness. Before she went to England she was never tart. However, let me continue.
I wonder what she means by rails. (I shall revise all this, of course, and no doubt will strike out portions.) I wonder if
she means I ought to begin with my name and address. It seems unnecessary, for I am naturally as well known to persons in
Storchwerder as the postman. On the other hand this is my first attempt (which explains why I wonder at all what Edelgard
may or may not mean, beginners doing well, I suppose, to be humble) at what poetic and literary and other persons of bad form
call, I believe, wooing the Muse. What an expression! And I wonder what Muse. I would like to ask Edelgard whether she—but
no, it would almost seem as if I were seeking her advice, which is a reversing of the proper relative positions of husband
and wife. So at this point, instead of adopting a course so easily disastrous, I turned my head and said quietly—
“Dear wife, our English experiences did begin with our visits to the neighbours. If it had not been for those visits we would probably not last summer have seen
Frau von Eckthum at all, and if we had not come within reach of her persuasive tongue we would have gone on our silver wedding
journey to Italy or Switzerland, as we had so often planned, and left that accursed island across the Channel alone.”
I paused; and as Edelgard said nothing, which is what she says when she is unconvinced, I continued with the patience I always
show her up to the point at which it would become weakness, to explain the difference between the exact and thorough methods
of men, their liking for going to the root of a matter and beginning at the real beginning, and the jumping tendencies of
women, who jump to things such as conclusions without paying the least heed to all the important places they have passed over
while they were, so to speak, in the air.
“But we get there first,” said Edelgard.
I frowned a little. A few months ago—before, that is, our time on British soil—she would not have made such a retort. She
used never to retort, and the harmony of our wedded life was consequently unclouded. I think she saw me frown, but she took
no notice—another novelty in her behaviour; so, after waiting a moment, I determined to continue the narrative.
But before I go straight on with it I s. . .
father in 1889, she met her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. They were married in London the following
year and lived in Berlin. After five years of marriage the von Arnims moved to their family estate, Nassenheide, in Pomerania:
Elizabeth’s experience and deep love of Nassenheide were to be wittily encapsulated in her first and most famous novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898. The twenty-one books she then went on to write were signed “By the author of Elizabeth and
Her German Garden”, and later simply “By Elizabeth”.
Elizabeth von Arnim gave birth to four daughters and a son, whose tutors at Nassenheide included E.M. Forster and Hugh Walpole.
Her idyllic Prussian days were, however, to be abruptly ended when, in 1908, debt forced the von Arnims to sell the estate.
They moved to England, and in 1910 Count von Arnim died. Buying a site in Switzerland Elizabeth built the Chateau Soleil where
she worked on her book and entertained such friends as H.G. Wells (with whom she had an affair), Katherine Mansfield (her
cousin), John Middleton Murry and Frank Swinnerton. On the outbreak of war she managed to escape to England, but she was unable
to rescue her daughter Felicitas, who died in Germany. In 1916 Elizabeth von Arnim married Francis, second Earl Russell, brother
of Bertrand Russell, whom she had met three years previously. This proved to be a disastrous union: in the first year of marriage
Elizabeth ran away to America and in 1919 the couple finally separated.
A greatly admired literary figure of her time, described by Alice Meynell as “one of the three finest wits of her day”, Elizabeth
spent her later years in Switzerland, London, and the French Riviera where she wrote her autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). On the outbreak of the Second World War she moved to America, where she died two years later at the age of seventy-five.
Of her novels Virago publishes Vera, Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Enchanted April, The Pastor’s Wife, and The Caravaners.
“One of the cleverest and most amusing stories of the year,” declared Punch, when The Caravaners was published in 1909. Elizabeth von Arnim’s witty account of an ill-assorted group of upper-class people grappling with
the hardships of the open road was an immediate success—it even spawned a new literary genre known as “Wayside Wisdom”. The
narrator of the story is one Baron Otto Von Ottringe, a pompous, humourless and stingy scion of Prussian gentry. He joins
a caravan tour of Kent and Sussex, attracted by its cheapness, and is disgusted by the laxity of English manners. Comic tension
is provided by the Baron’s increasing unpopularity among his fellow-travellers, and his own failure to notice it.
Elizabeth excelled at creating horribly hilarious male characters, and the bone-headed Baron is one of her very best. “Why
are the men in your books always disagreeable?” the writer George Moore once asked her. “Is the disagreeable man an integral
part of your style, just as the fat woman was a part of Rubens’s?” In fact, the disagreeable man was an integral part of Elizabeth’s
life. As a child, she had seen her mother blossom during the absences of her temperamental father, and she was always to assume
that women could only enjoy themselves fully when their menfolk were elsewhere. Her books are full of women oppressed and
constricted by the yokes of daughterhood and marriage, and she was keenly aware of the powerlessness of an intelligent woman in a male-dominated world. She used her pen
as an instrument of revenge, and the men in her life are often skewered in the pages of her fiction. Francis, Earl Russell,
her pathologically disturbed second husband, is so brilliantly and mercilessly immortalised in Vera that his brother, Bertrand Russell, later advised his children never to marry a novelist.
Baron Otto epitomises the kind of German man Elizabeth scorned and in The Caravaners she gleefully subjects him to all kinds of humiliations. It is probably the most purely funny novel she ever wrote, but there
is more than a hint of savagery beneath the humour. It is easy to see why Hugh Walpole pronounced it “so cruel that you blush
for her a little”.
Elizabeth was a dainty, ethereal woman of legendary personal charm. She had a voracious desire to be loved, and always managed
to surround herself with worshippers, but she never could resist teasing, and few of these infatuated people escaped the lash
of her wicked tongue. Teppi Backe, a young German governess, was amazed on her first day in the von Arnim nursery when her
employer suddenly erupted into the room, screaming like a fury, and whacked the baby with a hairbrush. That same evening,
however, she saw the sunny side of Elizabeth, and was enslaved. “A cream coloured gown wrapped her small body,” Teppi gushed
in her memoirs, “and a pearl necklace hung round her beautiful neck and was woven through the high piled brown hair. Beneath
the flowing gown could be seen shoes which would probably fit Cinderella.”
Hugh Walpole, writing after Elizabeth’s death in 1941, paid handsome tribute to her warmth and kindness, but did not gloss
over the harsher aspects of her character. “I had a horrible summer,” he said, recalling his period as tutor to the von Arnim
children.
When she was cruel, she was very cruel, and I was so miserable, so stupid and so homesick that I used to snivel in the cold
dark passages of the Schloss and ache for home. I doubt whether any experience in my life did me more good, but dear me, did
I suffer!
He was, admittedly, rather silly to show Elizabeth the pretentious diary he was keeping—which she never let him forget—but
the whole episode illustrates Elizabeth’s penchant for attacking people who were not equipped to answer back. This is very
evident in the most acidly satirical parts of The Caravaners.
The ménage Walpole joined at Nassenheide, out in the wilds of Pomerania, was a curious one. Elizabeth had been born in New
Zealand and brought up in England, and she was already a famous writer. To her stolid, countrified German neighbours, she
must have seemed dangerously exotic. Her husband, Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, was a Prussian aristocrat, struggling
to farm the dry soil of his ancestral acres and pay off his father’s debts. Henning was familiar to readers of his wife’s
best-loved novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden as “The Man of Wrath”, the affectionate but damping voice of authority.
Elizabeth met Henning in Rome in 1889, when she was 23-year-old Mary Annette Beauchamp, travelling with her parents. Henning
was a widower of forty, on the look-out for a suitable wife. Young Mary certainly did not conform to prevailing Teutonic standards
of “suitability”, but he was captivated. At the summit of the Duomo in Florence, he proposed to Elizabeth, in words which
have more than a suspicion of Baron Otto about them: “All girls like love. It is very agreeable. You will like it too. You
shall marry me and see.”
After they were married, however, Elizabeth felt stifled in Berlin society, where a woman was expected to know her place and provide endless children. Her first three daughters were born within three years, and she later complained that she got
pregnant if Henning so much as blew his nose in the same room. They were to have a total of five children—four girls and one
boy—in what Elizabeth referred to as her “wild career of unbridled motherhood”. In 1890, Henning moved his family to Nassenheide,
and Elizabeth revelled in the outdoor life. This was to be the “German Garden” of her first novel. “What a happy woman I am,”
she exclaimed, “with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!”
Elizabeth loved Nassenheide, but she became increasingly exasperated by Germany and the Germans. Above all, The Caravaners is a virulently anti-German book—the Baron regards England with the eyes of a potential invader, and declares that he never
wants to see it again unless he is marching at the head of his regiment. By 1907, Elizabeth knew that war between her two
countries was possible, and she was looking for ways to return to England with her children. There was also increasing tension
in her relationship with Henning, aggravated by financial worries. Longing for a respite, Elizabeth seized on the idea of
a caravan holiday in the Home Counties.
An advertisement for vans and horses in The Times fired her imagination. At that time, it was almost unheard of for a lady to rough it like a tinker, but she was not one to
care about the more pointless conventions of her era. “I can’t tell you yet what we’re going to do,” she wrote to her daughter
Evi, “But pray for fine weather, my child, for if it’s wet heaven knows what will become of us.” In the event, it was the
wettest August on record, and the caravaners spent most of their time shivering over a cauldron of rain-splashed porridge.
“Elizabeth, to whom the simplicities had seemed so alluring while she was lapped in the elaborate comforts of home, felt that
she had perhaps plunged into too many of them, too thoroughly,” her daughter Liebet remembered afterwards.
On the few fine days, however, Elizabeth was in tearing spirits, falling in love with every thatched cottage she saw, and
soaking up the blessed English atmosphere. They were a motley crew—Elizabeth, her daughters and two women friends lived in
the vans, and the young men, (who included E.M. Forster, another ex-tutor at Nassenheide) slept in tents. The attention they
attracted along the way was not always complimentary. When necessary, Elizabeth pulled out her title and reputation to obtain
decent campsites. Forster cherished the memory of her dancing a highland fling with a hospitable vicar.
All this was simmering in Elizabeth’s mind when she came to write The Caravaners. First, she had to find a plausible reason for her self-indulgent Baron to submit himself to such discomfort. The reason is,
quite simply, sex appeal. The von Ottringe’s neighbour, Frau von Eckthum, is an appealing little widow, who keeps the Baron
in a constant ferment of attraction and disapproval. Most of Elizabeth’s novels contain a tiny, enchanting and rather anarchic
heroine. This was how she saw herself, thin silk stockings, cooing voice and all. How can the Baron resist, when she paints
such an alluring picture of nights under the stars?
Frau von Eckthum’s less appealing sister, Mrs Menzies-Legh, unpatriotically married to an Englishman, is the brains behind
this holiday. She has assembled an eccentric group of wayfarers, and the Baron begins to have regrets as soon as he sets eyes
on the two young men of the party. They are, of course, an outrage to Prussian sensibilities, with their baggy clothes, mild
manners and progressive ideas. In particular, Elizabeth has great fun pitching the Baron against Mr Jellaby, who is a socialist
MP.
The first half of the book is broad farce. Away from his starchy home surroundings, the Baron is a ludicrous figure. The smoked
ox-tongue he has instructed his wife to hide away in their caravan for private consumption falls into the mud. He discovers
he is expected to lead his horse in all weathers, and go for more than two hours at a stretch without food. “This was not
a holiday,” he declares, “It was privation combined with exposure.”
The notion of upper-class people fending for themselves was a novelty for Edwardian readers, and they were fascinated by the
detailed descriptions of cooking and cleaning in such amusingly primitive conditions. Nowadays, the most interesting element
in the novel is its underlying debate about women’s rights. Eighty years on, the points Elizabeth makes are still relevant—she
goes right to the root of the problem. To say that Baron Otto is a male chauvinist pig is to put it mildly. “The perfect woman
does not talk at all,” he says. “Who wants to hear her?” His stout, submissive wife Edelgard is only audible when she agrees
with him. He is a monster of selfishness, even blaming his first wife for being knocked down by a carriage and inconsiderately
dying. When Mrs Menzies-Legh rejoices in “freedom from the ministrations of menials”, Otto assumes she means that the women
in the party will do all the work. After all, what is a woman for, if not to provide meals and babies when wanted? Elizabeth
captures his absurd sense of injury with deadly accuracy—he simply cannot believe that the females are not expected to sacrifice
themselves for his comfort.
“A reasonable man,” maintains the Baron, “will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every point of
view before consenting to follow them, or allowing her to follow them.” Elizabeth must have heard statements like this issuing
from beneath many a Prussian moustache, and her comedy is tinged with the bitterness of experience: “Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem.
It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood.” The
withdrawal of love is an ancient male weapon. Poor Edelgard is not the first woman to be emotionally blackmailed in this way,
nor will she be the last.
Red Mr Jellaby, with his unfailing consideration for the ladies, serves as an excellent foil for the Baron’s grotesque sexism.
One of the most significant exchanges in the book takes place when Jellaby is cooking sausages over the camp fire, and the
Baron is holding an umbrella over the frying pan. The task is so unpleasant, he suggests they tell Edelgard to do it. Jellaby
is outraged. “Monstrous,” he says.
“Why should she cook for us? Why should she come out in the wet to cook for us? Why should any woman cook for fourteen years
without interruption?”
“She did it joyfully, Jellaby, for the comfort and sustenance of her husband, as every virtuous woman should.”
“I think,” said he, “It would choke me.”
“What would choke you?”
“Food produced by the unceasing labour of my wife. Why should she be treated as a servant, when she gets neither wages nor
the privilege of giving notice and going away?”
Such dangerous notions are dismissed as nonsense by the Baron, but to his consternation, they begin to work on his wife. Edelgard
shortens her skirts and loosens her hair, copying the pagan appearances of Frau von Eckthum and Mrs Menzies-Legh. She becomes
boyish and fleet of foot, and begins to lose weight. This is a little exaggerated, since it is all supposed to happen in one
week, but the transformation is deeply symbolic from Elizabeth’s point of view. Like herself, Edelgard is shedding her German qualities and embracing the freedom of England.
Elizabeth equated fat with stupidity and weakness, and despised fat people. When her daughters showed signs of chubbiness
as small children, she made them run round the garden until they were breathless. Edelgard cannot be properly liberated until
her clothes have begun to hang on her.
And the loss of her admirable German embonpoint is only the tip of the iceberg, as the Baron discovers.
“I gently began ‘Dear wife – ’ and was going on when she interrupted me.
‘Dear husband’ she said, actually imitating me, ‘I know what you are going to say. I always know what you are going to say.
I know all the things you ever can or ever do say.’
She paused a moment, and then added in a firm voice, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘By heart.’”
To sustain a novel with such a preposterous character at its centre is quite a task. At first, the Baron is tolerable, and
even strangely likeable, because he is the begetter of such delightful comedy. However, Elizabeth is not content to leave
it at that. Towards the end, the tone sharpens, and the “cruelty” noticed by Hugh Walpole comes into play. Although it is
richly deserved, the ostracism of the Baron is painful to witness. “It was very odd,” he muses, as he recalls innocently chasing
his fellow travellers round a dance floor, “It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up, they went down; when I
went down, they went up.” For a few lines, he has an almost tragic stature. Frau von Eckthum is overheard explaining why her
sister tries to be nice to him: “She says … that his loneliness, whether he knows it or not, makes her ache.” Elizabeth could
not allow her readers to ache for someone so unworthy, and the tone is quickly forced back into hilarity.
The Caravaners was begun at Nassenheide early in 1908. Financial pressure was mounting, and the estate was put up for sale. Henning wanted
to move to his mother’s house, Schlagenthin—a “mausoleum” according to Elizabeth. Eventually, she left her husband to negotiate
the sale, and set up house at Broadclyst, in Devon. Here, she continued to work on her novel. Despite the upheaval, the anxieties
over money and the loss of the “German Garden” which had made her famous, she was in sparkling form when she wrote The Caravaners. The vital ingredient in all her work is fun, and here she is at her most sprightly and irreverent. Occasionally, the acid
bite of her humour makes one wince instead of smile, but the overall effect is as exhilarating as a stiff sea breeze. In his
generous obituary, the devoted Hugh Walpole placed her alongside Jane Austen as a writer of comedy, and added: “English literature
is not so crammed with wits that it can spare Elizabeth.”
Kate Saunders, London,1998
IN June this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer had really come at last. The effect was to make us
feel our flat (which is really a very nice well-planned one on the second floor at the corner overlooking the cemetery, and
not at all stuffy) but a dull place after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was the year of the
fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of
August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on trips into the country in June. My wife therefore suggested
that we should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a radius of, say, from five to ten miles round
our town, and visit one after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to Storchwerder and farm their own
estates. “In this way,” said she, “we shall get much fresh air at little cost.”
After a time I agreed. Not immediately, of course, for a reasonable man will take care to consider the suggestions made by
his wife from every point of view before consenting to follow them or allowing her to follow them. Women do not reason: they have instincts; and instincts would land them in strange places sometimes if it
were not that their husbands are there to illuminate the path for them and behave, if one may so express it, as a kind of
guiding and very clever glow-worm. As for those who have not succeeded in getting husbands, the flotsam and jetsam, so to
speak, of their sex, all I can say is God help them.
There was nothing, however, to be advanced against Edelgard’s idea in this case; on the contrary, there was much to commend
it. We should get fresh air; we should be fed (well fed, and, if we chose, to excess, but of course we know how to be reasonable);
and we should pay nothing. As Major of the artillery regiment stationed at Storchwerder I am obliged anyhow to keep a couple
of horses (they are fed at the cost of the regiment,) and I also in the natural order of things have one of the men of my
battalion in my flat as servant and coachman, who costs me little more than his keep and may not give me notice. All, then,
that was wanting was a vehicle, and we could, as Edelgard pointed out, easily borrow our Colonel’s waggonette for a few afternoons,
so there was our equipage complete, and without spending a penny.
The estates round Storchwerder are big, and we found on counting up that five calls would cover the entire circle of our country
acquaintance. There might have been a sixth, but for reasons with which I entirely concurred my dear wife did not choose to
include it. Lines have to be drawn, and I do not think an altogether bad definition of a gentleman or a lady would be one who draws them. Indeed, Edelgard was in some doubt as to whether there should be even five, a member of
the five—not in this case actually the land-owner but the brother of the widowed lady owning it, who lives with her and looks
after her interests—being a person we neither of us can care much about, because he is not only unsound politically, with
a decided leaning disgraceful in a man of his birth and which he hardly takes any trouble to hide towards those views the
middle classes and Socialist sort of people call (God save the mark) enlightened, but he is also either unable or unwilling—Edelgard
and I could never make up our minds which—to keep his sister in order. Yet to keep the woman one is responsible for in order
whether she be sister, or wife, or mother, or daughter, or even under certain favourable conditions aunt—a difficult race
sometimes, as may be seen by the case of Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhilgel, of whom perhaps more later—is really quite easy. It is
only a question of beginning in time, as you mean to go on in fact, and of being especially firm whenever you feel internally
least so. It is so easy that I never could understand the difficulty. It is so easy that when my wife at this point brought
me my eleven o’clock bread and ham and butter and interrupted me by looking over my shoulder, I smiled up at her, my thoughts
still running on this theme, and taking the hand that put down the plate said, “Is it not, dear wife?”
“Is what not?” she asked,—rather stupidly I thought, for she had read what I had written to the end; then without giving me time to reply she said, “Are you not going to write the story of our experiences in England after
all, Otto?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“To lend round among our relations next winter?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“Then had you not better begin?”
“Dear wife,” said I, “it is what I am doing.”
“Then,” said she, “do not waste time going off the rails.”
And sitting down in the window she resumed her work of enlarging the armholes of my shirts.
This, I may remark, was tartness. Before she went to England she was never tart. However, let me continue.
I wonder what she means by rails. (I shall revise all this, of course, and no doubt will strike out portions.) I wonder if
she means I ought to begin with my name and address. It seems unnecessary, for I am naturally as well known to persons in
Storchwerder as the postman. On the other hand this is my first attempt (which explains why I wonder at all what Edelgard
may or may not mean, beginners doing well, I suppose, to be humble) at what poetic and literary and other persons of bad form
call, I believe, wooing the Muse. What an expression! And I wonder what Muse. I would like to ask Edelgard whether she—but
no, it would almost seem as if I were seeking her advice, which is a reversing of the proper relative positions of husband
and wife. So at this point, instead of adopting a course so easily disastrous, I turned my head and said quietly—
“Dear wife, our English experiences did begin with our visits to the neighbours. If it had not been for those visits we would probably not last summer have seen
Frau von Eckthum at all, and if we had not come within reach of her persuasive tongue we would have gone on our silver wedding
journey to Italy or Switzerland, as we had so often planned, and left that accursed island across the Channel alone.”
I paused; and as Edelgard said nothing, which is what she says when she is unconvinced, I continued with the patience I always
show her up to the point at which it would become weakness, to explain the difference between the exact and thorough methods
of men, their liking for going to the root of a matter and beginning at the real beginning, and the jumping tendencies of
women, who jump to things such as conclusions without paying the least heed to all the important places they have passed over
while they were, so to speak, in the air.
“But we get there first,” said Edelgard.
I frowned a little. A few months ago—before, that is, our time on British soil—she would not have made such a retort. She
used never to retort, and the harmony of our wedded life was consequently unclouded. I think she saw me frown, but she took
no notice—another novelty in her behaviour; so, after waiting a moment, I determined to continue the narrative.
But before I go straight on with it I s. . .
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