A Fascinating Life: The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

A Fascinating Life:The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Römhild Joyce Morgan. The Countess from Kirribilli: the Mysterious and Free-spirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021. Pp. viii, 344. isbn: 978-1-76087-517-6, au$32.99. Elizabeth von Arnim's readers are in a unique position: they can now choose from no less than five biographies in English (and one in German) to learn more about their favourite author. The first, written by von Arnim's daughter under the pseudonym Leslie De Charms (1958), was a collage of excerpts from diaries and letters with brief comments for context. The second, by Karen Usborne (1986), offered the first comprehensive account of von Arnim's [End Page 91] life although not all its claims hold up to closer scrutiny. The third biography, by Jennifer Walker (2013), is based on scrupulous research and is currently the go-to biography for scholars. In 2020 Gabrielle Carey used von Arnim's life as a springboard for autobiographical meditations on von Arnim's and her own quest for happiness. Now, only one year later, Joyce Morgan has added yet another biography—what, the reader wonders, could there possibly be left to tell? As it turns out a fair bit. The Countess from Kirribilli offers a fresh and eminently readable account of von Arnim's colourful life. Morgan, an experienced Australian author, biographer and journalist, traces the stations of von Arnim's biography with a deft hand: born in 1866 in Kirribilli (Sydney) into an English-Australian merchant family as Mary Annette Beauchamp, von Arnim spent only the first years of her life in Australia before her father relocated the family back to Europe. The Beauchamps were a mobile lot, and von Arnim inherited her father's travel gene. On a trip to Italy at the age of 23, she met and then married Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin and settled with him first in Berlin, then on a large property near the Baltic Sea, where the young Countess wrote her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1896). Published anonymously, it became a literary sensation overnight. It established "Elizabeth" as a household name and forever identified von Arnim with her literary alter ego, Elizabeth. Von Arnim wrote several sequels and quickly established herself as an author of witty novels of women's doubtful quest for personal fulfilment in marriage and an astute political satirist of German nationalism. Although she remained faithful to her themes, von Arnim's range in tone and her skilful play with genre remain impressive: The Caravaners (1909) is a bitingly comical self-portrait of a pompous Prussian officer. Vera (1921) uses the Gothic to create a devastating study of domestic abuse, which John Middleton Murry compared with Wuthering Heights—written by Jane Austen. By contrast, The Enchanted April (1922) is a light-hearted tale about the restorative effects of a holiday in Italy, which reminded Katherine Mansfield of Mozart. Today, we can appreciate von Arnim, who wrote over twenty best-selling novels, as a great—if academically still undervalued—satirist of the early twentieth century. Her contemporaries certainly recognized her as such, and von Arnim's friends included Bertrand Russell, Katherine Mansfield, her lover H. G. Wells, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, Ethel Smyth and many others. Several of her novels were made into films; Patrick White thought The Caravaners was the funniest book he had ever read, and Virginia Woolf compared von Arnim's sense of comedy with Dickens. After living in England and Switzerland for many years, von Arnim settled at the French Riviera, before fleeing from the Nazis to the u.s. where several of her children lived. She died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1941. [End Page 92] Morgan's biography makes important contributions to von Arnim scholarship. She offers an impressively detailed account of the slow discovery of von Arnim's identity by the press. Throughout her life von Arnim's books were signed "By the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden", and for the first years of her career, von Arnim, who was notoriously private, managed to avoid any connection between the august von Arnim family...