The Solitary Summer

Book 401: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if anyone calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick . . . Wouldn't a whole lovely summer, quite alone, be delightful?' This delightful companion to the famous Elizabeth and her German Garden is a witty, lyrical account of a rejuvenating, solitary summer filled with books and Elizabeth's reflections on her beloved garden. Descriptions of magnificent larkspurs and burning nasturtiums give way to those of cooling forest walks. Yet the months aren't as solitary as she'd planned: there's still her husband to pacify and the April, May and June babies to amuse.

Release date: November 3, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 78

Sample

On a late afternoon in May 1897, a young woman sat outside in the warm fresh air after a shower of rain and wrote: “I love
my garden.” It was the first sentence of an anonymous work which became a best-seller, running into twenty-one reprints in
its first twelve months, and thereafter regularly reprinting several times a year until 1914. When Macmillan accepted the
manuscript, it was the most “purely happy moment” of the young author’s life, too happy to be described, so she simply noted
in her journal: “Got answer re G. G. accepting it.” “G.G.” was shorthand for Elizabeth and Her German Garden, the inspired title of a book that was less about a garden than about its vivacious author’s responses to her life. No sooner
had she corrected its proofs than she embarked on its sequel: The Solitary Summer. She began it in July 1898, finished seven months later, and Macmillan brought it out in 1899 to a chorus of critical acclaim:
“In many respects a great advance” — Country Gentleman … “Herein is ripeness that was missing from the earlier book” — London Letter … “An author who can endow all she touches with life” — Manchester Guardian. It was again anonymous. The title page simply said: “By the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden”.


So who was she? Speculation as to her identity can only have added to the allure of the books. She presented herself as German,
but her English was faultlessly idiomatic, though the noted man of letters, Arthur Quiller-Couch, pointed out (much to her
chagrin) that she split the occasional infinitive. Was she really English? Was she a daughter of Queen Victoria? Was she a
woman at all? Might she be the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, who had already written a book in discursive, journal form called
The Garden that I Love? Or was she the young English wife of the Count von Arnim?


The last guess was the right one. She was indeed the Countess von Arnim, and her “garden” was the park of a vast estate in
Pomerania. But she was not German and her name was not “Elizabeth”. Her maiden name was Mary Annette Beauchamp; she was born
in Australia in 1866. The first three years of her life were spent in a fine house overlooking Sydney Harbour, for her English
father had emigrated to Australia, married a Tasmanian, and made a fortune as a shipping merchant. But the whole family —
father, mother and six children — returned to London in 1870; she was educated by a governess, in London and Lausanne, then
at Queen’s College, Acton, and finally at the Royal College of Music, where she studied piano and organ. Her legs were so
short that she had a strenuous time reaching the pedals.


She was barely five feet tail, slim, blue-eyed, square-jawed, with a little wrinkle on her nose when she smiled. Her voice
was high and soft, a sort of coo; E. M. Forster described it as a “society drawl”. She had a very pretty elder sister under
whose shadow her own prettiness seemed questionable. But she was stylish (her cousin Katherine Mansfield was to write, in
1921: “I have gathered Elizabeth’s frocks to my bosom as if they were part of her flowers”). By that time everyone had adopted
her alias and was calling her “Elizabeth”. In her youth, and to her family, she was simply “May”. Her first husband, Henning von Arnim, called her “Dolly”.


He met her in Italy in 1889. She was twenty-three and on an extended tour with her father; he was thirty-eight, travelling
alone, seeking to recover from the deaths of his first wife and infant child. He heard the young English woman playing Bach
fugues in the American church in Rome and quickly decided that she should be his second wife. He was himself a brilliant pianist
— a pupil of Liszt. He was also a highly intelligent man, terse and authoritarian, the product of a paternalistic, hoch geboren society. He proposed to her several times, ignoring her refusals; finally Elizabeth gave way. She learnt German, they were
married and a few years later he became the model for her comic creation: “The Man of Wrath”.


He wanted an heir. For the first three successive years of their marriage, living in Berlin, she bore him daughters. Characteristically
disregarding the true months of their births, she called them the April, May and June babies. But she was full of resentment
at the enforced childbearine, while he was relentless in his continuing demands tor a son. After prolonged hostility between
them, Elizabeth produced a fourth daughter in 1899: she became pregnant while she was still writing The Solitary Summer.


But by then her life had changed for the better. They had moved to Nassenheide, one of the von Arnim family estates: a huge
sixteenth-century house set in an immense, flat landscape of forests and water and fields of waving rye and sandy black roads,
where the cranes flew crying through the sky in winter and butterflies danced over the fields in summer, and her love affair
with a place and a garden began.


Like many love affairs, it involved a conflict. She wanted to be by herself there, she wanted to shed her clamouring domestic
responsibilities and wander off with a book, to He down on the mown grass beneath the bird-cherry trees. She wanted to get
into the open basketwork carriage with scarlet wheels, her Great Dane, Ingraban, beside her, and be whirled through the woods by the faithful old coachman, sometimes even as far as the Baltic Sea. She did
not want to spend her time distributing sausages and entertaining a stream of visitors.


Elizabeth was a prodigious reader. Temperamentally, she identified with die Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Keats;
but she knew her Spenser and Milton, her Goethe and Schiller. She read Tnoreau and regarded him as a close but solemn friend
whom she could tease. She also read Crabbe, Pater, Stevenson, Pepys, Boswell, Carlisle; the May 15th entry on her reading
in The Solitary Summer is an elegant tour de force.


If you had encountered her in the garden when she hoped to be alone, she might have been icy. In Elizabeth and Her German Garden she had written witheringly of the unwanted persons who interrupted her private moments:


I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors — not stray callers to be got rid of after due administration of tea and
things you are sorry afterwards that you said, but people staying in the house and not to be got rid of at all… a garden where
you meet the people you saw at breakfast, and will see again at lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy in.


She was clever and an incorrigible tease. If she thought you stupid, or hidebound, she would make you shrivel under her contempt
and impatience. But if you amused her she would be, in return, like a glass of champagne: sparkling, dry, lifting the present
moment until it blotted out all humdrum anxieties and fears for the past and future, and leaving a sense of flatness behind
her when she went away. Her father found in his “darling May”, “a rare and fascinating combination of dove and serpent”. E.
M. Forster, who was English tutor to her children in 1904, rapidly decided that she was “most pleasant and amusing and I think
I shall like her very much. She is, as I rather expected, nicer than her books, and I don’t feel in awe of her.” In the evenings at Nassenheide he found himself reading Jane Austen aloud to her.


One of his successors as English tutor to her children, Hugh Walpole, though terrified of her at first, became in later years
her devoted fan: “I really like her better than any other woman alive,” he wrote in 1919. “She has everything — brain, heart,
humour, pluck.” Two years later Katherine Mansfield wrote, in a letter to the painter, Brett: “the point about her is that
one loves her and is proud of her.”


Elizabeth did not love herself, and had a sharp line in self-ridicule. She presented herself as an ignorant and over-optimistic
gardener, surrounded by mistakes and weeds. She was dismissive about her own writing and embarrassed if high claims were made
for it. When she finished The Solitary Summer she recorded in her diary: “Read it through — mixed feelings — chiefly disgust. Futility that cannot be uttered.” She told
John Middleton Murry, after Katherine Mansfield’s death — “I so longed for her not to mind me too much, not to find me out
too completely.” She wore a defensive armour against adverse criticism. She allows one of her early heroines, Fraulein Schmidt,
to confess:


“I adore being praised. Dreadfully vain down in my heart, I go about pretending a fine aloofness from such weakness, so that
when nobody sees anything in me — and nobody ever does — I may at least make a show of not having expected them to …”


Her pride, her scorn of self-pity, was part of the front which so intimidated the young Hugh Walpole in 1907 when he sat down
at the Nassenheide luncheon table along with the German tutor, the German governess, the French governess, the four litde
girls, the little boy (for she had at last had a son), and the Count and Countess themselves. He distinguished three different
modes in her behaviour:


(1) Charming, like her books only more so (this does not appear often).

(2) Ragging. Now she is unmerciful — attacks you on every side, goes at you until you are reduced to idiocy, and then drops
you limp.


(3) Silence. This is the most terrible of all. She sits absolutely mute and if one tries to speak one gets snubbed.

The silent Elizabeth was, of course, the writer. She had come in from her Treibhaus — the high greenhouse where, behind long windows, she took to writing in the years after she scribbled The Solitary Summer in an upstairs room. Her mind was still full of her “stories”, as she called them, when she came indoors; she could not handle
lunchtime chat. She was a compulsive writer. As soon as she finished one book she embarked upon another. She turned her life
into fiction as she went along, both simplifying and exaggerating the things that happened to her. Wherever she lived (and
she was to live in many different houses and several different countries) there was always a litde garden house where she
worked, usually with a forbidding inscription over the door. Her children longed for her company but accepted her withdrawal
from them; it had always been so. As one story succeeded another, she took to keeping regular, professional writing hours
— hours which allowed her to emerge positively relaxed at lunchtime and able to join in her guests’ conversation before disappearing
again in the afternoons.


But in 1898, when Elizabeth was writing The Solitary Summer, there was no such luxury. The book was written patchily, and against the odds. The beautiful promise of summer weather in
May that year was followed by ruinous screaming gales. She did not start writing until July, and in August she took the children
away for a seaside holiday. In September her relations with her husband became so full of “wrath” that she took herself, alone,
to England. When she returned to Nassenheide, she brought her sister and niece with her; she did not begin to write again
until cold November; by December, she discovered her pregnancy with a heavy heart. But she finished the book in January, corrected
the proofs in February, and The Solitary Summery, light hearted and ebullient, was in the bookshops by the following May.


It i. . .