About the book: The Enchanted April (1922), Elizabeth von Arnim's brilliant, irrepressible novella, tells the tale of four very different women who, on answering an advertisement in The Times, find themselves far away from the drizzle of London and instead in the warmth of an Italian sun. There, alongside the lapping of the Mediterranean, the women's spirits begin to shift, and quite unexpected changes take place.
First published in 1922, this delightful novel is imbued with the descriptive power and light-hearted irreverence for which Elizabeth von Arnin is renowned.
About the author: Elizabeth von Arnim was born on 31 August 1866 in Australia. She was cousin to the writer Katherine Mansfield. In 1890, she married her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, with whom she had five children.
Elizabeth and her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898, was a barely fictionalised account of Elizabeth’s life and the creation of her garden at the family home of Nassenheide in Pomerania, where Hugh Walpole and E M Forster were tutors to her children. Its instant success was followed by many more novels, including Vera (1921) and The Enchanted April (1922), and another almost-autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). She separated from Count von Arnim in 1908, and after his death two years later, she built a house in Switzerland, marrying John Francis Stanley Russell in 1916. This marriage also ended in separation in 1919 when Elizabeth moved to America, where she died on 9 February 1941, aged 74.
Rating: 5/5
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