Tag Archives: Elizabeth von Arnim

April

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Just back from a month in Spain, house- and cat-sitting for our son and his family while they visited his in-laws in S. America. It was good to have a change of scene, culture and climate. This is what I’ve been reading en route and while there:

Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson. Translated from the Spanish (as usual) by Margaret Jull Costa. Penguin, 2024; 20211. I’ve read a good deal of this author’s work (links to posts about them can be found by searching his name in the search box), and this was sadly his last novel: he died in 2022. This was not his finest; at over 600pp it sprawled a little too much – but Marías even when sprawling is always entertaining and bracing. Most of the characters have appeared in his earlier spy thrillers – the eponymous Tomás, who’d been recruited to MI5 as a student at Oxford, then trained by the urbane Bernard Tupra. His semi-estranged wife, Bella, featured centrally in Bella Isla.

Tomás is tempted by Tupra out of retirement and an edgy reconciliation with Bella – one last assignment. He’s given details of three women living in a northwestern Spanish town, one of whom is a member of the IRA who’d been involved in bomb attacks while liaising with the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA in the eighties. His mission is to get to know all three and…well, deal with her (‘take her out of the picture’ is how the sinister Tupra puts it). Much of the subtlety and complication of the narrative involves Tomás grappling with his finer feelings and sense of betrayal and duplicity as he gets to know the three women more intimately, in conflict with the imperative to stop this person a) getting away with mass murder, and b) committing another such act. Besides, what if he takes out the wrong woman?

There are the usual layers of literary allusion and quotation, especially Shakespearean (and in particular that sanguinary play, Macbeth); a recurring phrase, that haunts and taunts Tomás, is ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent’. The significance of this enigmatic statement shifts and reforms itself as Tomás’s compromised position develops.

I shall miss these flawed characters and the nuanced narrative poise of this fine author.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and her German Garden. VMC 1985; 18981. The author moved with her husband, the German aristocrat Count von Arnim, to his rural estate, 90 miles north of Berlin. At its heart was a 17C castle, later a convent, but it and the estate had been uninhabited and neglected for over 25 years. The building was semi-derelict, and the grounds overgrown and weed-filled.

The Elizabeth who narrates this slightly fictionalised account of that period of her life loves the solitude the estate provides, and the haven it provides for her to read and tend the garden. There are rather too many detailed accounts of what plants she cultivates and how she arranges the borders; there’s a semblance of plot and narrative variation in the sequence of demanding female guests she entertains – much to the consternation and disapproval of her husband, whom she unflatteringly refers to always as ‘the man of wrath’. He expounds some pretty horrible misogynistic views about the status and shortcomings of women: they are just below ‘children and idiots’ in his estimation.

It’s a strange, meandering novel/memoir, and a touch too whimsical for my taste.

Kate Grenville, Restless Dolly Maunder. Canongate, 2024. This was one of the novels Mrs TD brought with her to Spain. I’d read and enjoyed this Australian author’s earlier novel The Secret River; this one also arises from the history of her ancestors after emigration (or transportation) to Australia.

Its theme is presented in a more sustained and overt way than von Arnim is prepared to commit to: the terrible restrictions and humiliations imposed on women in patriarchal late-19C – early 20C society. Dolly is a clever, spirited girl, but her ability to make something of her life is severely curtailed by societal and familial expectations. That’s why she’s so restless, always questing for a new venture, a new challenge.

Unfortunately I found this led to a repetitive narrative structure: she moves from one business to another (hotels or hospitality – considered acceptable for a woman) with her feckless husband. It’s nevertheless an interesting account of Dolly’s struggle for some kind of autonomy in a world where women are considered second-class (as Elizabeth found with her ‘man of wrath’). The last few pages provide much-needed background and context – I might have responded more positively to the novel if this had come earlier.

Catalonia was as lovely as ever, and we had a memorable trip to the dramatic mountaintop basilica and monastery of Montserrat to see ‘la Moreneta’ – the black Madonna.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners

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Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners. VMC 2002. First published 1909

Baron Otto von Ottringel is to celebrate his fifth wedding anniversary with his second, much younger wife Edelgard. Had his late first wife lived they would have been celebrating their silver anniversary the previous summer, and been regaled with gifts and congratulations by his Prussian regiment (he’s a major) and others – but of course that couldn’t happen. He’s rather put out about this:

All this I feel I have missed, and through no fault of my own. I fail to see why I should be deprived of every benefit of such a celebration, for have I not, with an interruption of twelve months forced upon me, been actually married twenty-five years?…if Marie-Luise [his first wife] failed me it was not my fault…

So begins this broad farce about a truly horrible man’s disastrous caravan holiday in England with his long-suffering Edelgard and a group of people he despises openly. He’s a pompous, humourless and stingy snob. He only agrees to the trip because he thinks it will be cheaper than paying for a hotel stay in sunnier Italy.

His attitude to her is patronising and dismissive: he describes her as ‘a most admirably trained Hausfrau’: he goes on to generalise –

The perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we wish, for a change, to tell her about our own thoughts, and that she should be at hand when we want anything. Surely this is not too much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak, on every table; and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays and combines being useful with being dumb.

On the other hand he declares that ‘it is proper and delightful that the wives of others should be attractive, but one’s own ought to adorned solely with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit combined with that other ornament, an enduring desire to keep her husband God has given her comfortable and therefore happy.’

He’s supposedly writing all this in a journal which he intends to read aloud to what he assumes will be admiring and jealous friends when they return to Germany from their holiday. He becomes increasingly impatient and annoyed as the weather continues to be typically English – wet, windy, cold – and his travelling companions irritate him by being, well, normal and not priggish and self-centred like him. The caravan is cramped and uncomfortable – but he expects Edelgard to do all the domestic work.

There are moments of spiky humour, but for the most part I found all this a bit tiresome. He’s just too unspeakably vile and brutish to find amusing. It’s a narrative technique similar to the Grossmiths’ in their portrayal of Mr Pooter, with whom he shares the tendency to think he’s a far more accomplished and admirable person than everyone else; but his lack of self-awareness and his arrogance make me just want him to shut up.

He openly leers at one of the pretty female German fellow travellers, but sneers at the men, one of them a socialist English MP, with his baggy clothes and liberal views. At first dismissive of the other Englishman, he becomes fawning and attentive when he discovers he’s an aristocrat.

What’s worse, his submissive wife becomes increasingly liberated in this company, and Baron Otto gets ever more intolerant with her. He fails to see that the party’s numbers dwindle because the others find his company insufferable.

I can see that Elizabeth von Arnim had great fun taking these swipes at an arrogant militaristic fool, having married one herself and regretted it. He’s an easy target, though. He sees England and its inhabitants as decadent and soft, ripe for Prussian armies like his to invade and convert to Teutonic orderliness and discipline. He’d have been gratified when war broke out just a few years after this novel was published.

Extracted by torment: Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera

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Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941), Vera. Hesperus Press, 2015; first published 1921

John Middleton Murry, husband of Elizabeth von Arnim’s cousin Katherine Mansfield, consoled the author after Vera had attracted some bad reviews, by saying the reviewers had failed to understand a tragi-comedy that read like Wuthering Heights as written by Jane Austen. This dark, disturbing novel also presages a later novel about a woman who’d died in mysterious circumstances before the events in the novel take place: Rebecca.

My Hesperus Press paperback edition of Elizabeth von Arnim, VeraVera is about a naïve young woman who ‘was engulfed’ by the apparent grief-stricken affection of a man named Everard Wemyss. His wife Vera had recently died – in a way that increasingly suggests his pathological egotism and what we now call coercive control had led to her suicide. He comes upon young Lucy, grieving for her father who’d just died at their Cornwall holiday cottage, and she is smitten by what seems his tender empathy and sensitive soul. He takes advantage of her damaged emotional state and vulnerability.

She rapidly discovers that she’s made a terrible mistake. His domineering control of her and his household once they’re married is so obsessive as to become a nightmare for poor Lucy. Despite the best efforts of her caring Aunt Dot, Wemyss is able to dismiss all who try to mitigate his insistence on complete servitude in his young wife.

Like Torvald in A Doll’s House, he’s created a gilded cage for his little bird; like Nora’s patronising husband he repeatedly infantilises Lucy, calling her his ‘little girl’, his ‘baby’, while scolding her and criticising her for showing the least sign of spirit or rebellion. It becomes increasingly difficult to read such stuff – but it holds the attention like a slowly unfolding car-crash.

It’s not just his gaslighting, chauvinistic narcissism and cruel oppression that’s so disturbing. He seems to derive pleasure from her immature appearance and demeanour:

He adored her bobbed hair that gave her the appearance of a child or a very young boy…all he asked in a woman was devotion.

This is the spine-chilling moment, narrated from his sickening point of view, when he looks at Lucy entering the registry office where they are to be married and she is to become his latest trophy:

If only she would take off her hat, thought Wemyss, bursting with pride, so that the registrar could see how young she looked with her short hair – why perhaps the old boy might think she was too young to be married and start asking searching questions! What fun that would be.

There are moments of humour, as when Aunt Dot contemplates Wemyss’s tepid style of courting Lucy at her aunt’s house in London, and the only word she can find to describe his mode of ‘love-making’ (in the old fashioned sense) is ‘vegetarian’. He’s dismissive of Lucy’s family’s bohemian, spontaneous, cultivated and artistic ways: he’s a cold-blooded philistine and a prig. He’s a veritable Casaubon to Lucy’s Dorothea – but far more sinister.

It seems von Arnim wrote Vera in response to her own disastrous second marriage to Frank, second Earl Russell (brother of philosopher Bertrand). Her first husband was a domineering, typically Prussian Junker aristocrat, Graf von Arnim-Schlagentin. Among the tutors they employed for their children were EM Forster and Hugh Walpole: she moved in exalted circles, but showed less discernment in her choice of lovers – including, perhaps, the three years (1910-13) she spent as a mistress of HG Wells.

Rebecca West was understandably impressed by this novel; there’s a deeply felt awkwardness and growing sense of menacing claustrophobia, being stifled and threatened by this monstrous husband that Lucy experiences. Elizabeth von Arnim wrote to her daughter about Vera:

I’ll never write anything so good again. I daresay more popular…but not so really good. It was extracted from me by torment, so that I do not want to write so well again – not at such a price.