Elizabeth Von Arnim Research Articles

A Counterfactual Canon

The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

A Fascinating Life: The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim

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...

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950

Elizabeth and her Polish Garden: Elizabeth von Arnim’s influence on the identity of contemporary Pomeranians

Elizabeth and her Polish Garden: Elizabeth von Arnim’s influence on the identity of contemporary Pomeranians

‘Maternal Flapping’: Motherhood and National Sentiment in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Letters to Beatrix von Hirschberg

ABSTRACT To Elizabeth von Arnim, her experience of motherhood was associated with a particularly German coupling of sentimentality and brutality. This article explores the nexus between sentimentality, motherhood, German ideology, and the concept of Kultur in von Arnim’s letters to her daughter Beatrix von Hirschberg. Spanning close to forty years, this correspondence, read in conjunction with von Arnim’s short sketch ‘Christmas in a Bavarian Village’ (1937), offers a deeper understanding of von Arnim’s political views and her experience of the vagaries of motherhood.

Definition of the Situation – a Misunderstood and Undervalued Concept. The Contribution of Literature

Definition of the situation, the core concept of Symbolic interactionism, sometimes erroneously confused with Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy, is often overlooked both in sociological theorization and in everyday life. Since human beings tend to believe in the existence of a solid, incontrovertible reality, they do not put themselves in the role of others to know their definitions of the situation; consequently, misunderstandings and suffering arise. Being often obscure, difficult to grasp and remote from the men and women it studies, sociological theory that could help to improve social life often remains in textbooks. As social sciences and good literature have the same object of interest - human beings and their relationships - a better formulation and better understanding of sociological theorizations could be obtained by linking them to novels, short stories and plays. Narratives could clarify sociological concepts and highlight their potentialities. I have focused here on two episodes, one taken from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , the other from Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife , that let us see how the same object can be defined in opposite ways. Subsequently, I have highlighted how the contributions of Proust and Pirandello, two authors who look at reality with a symbolic interactionist gaze, could help in better understanding the dramatic power and the fragility of the definitions that give sense to human behavior and human existence.

“Swimming among the Jellyfish”: travel guides, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rügen

ABSTRACTIn the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and beautiful jellyfish, stars of purest colours, floated with you”. This essay examines Arthur Schuster’s Fuhrer durch die Insel Rugen (1902) and Marianne North’s travel autobiography as background to Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen (1904) and how the Rügen novel began as a travel account before merging into fiction as the protagonist attempts and fails to write her own travel guide and, in opposition to social conventions for her gender and class, become a female solitary traveller.

The Spinster in the Garden: Joy and Transcendence in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

This article proposes an original reading of Father (1931) and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), two texts by Elizabeth von Arnim that centre on a young single woman. It will examine how female autonomy is spatially imagined in the form of a garden and poses significant challenges to the patriarchal societies presented in the texts. Many scholars have detailed the recurring motif of the garden in Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899). The two texts this article addresses were published later than those that have been discussed in relation to the garden, and signal a move away from the married female towards an examination of the independent or single female. Significantly, they disrupt the traditional ‘marriage plot’ novel by tracing two single women’s movement into the garden as a retreat from the societies in which they live. In both texts, von Arnim presents a distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience for her female protagonists that contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by urban society. These texts turn on dichotomies—city/country, built/organic environments, repression/freedom—to expose the central characters’ repression and their attempts to gain some degree of independence. Each central character experiences joy as a result of her interaction with the organic environment and the power the protagonist exercises over this space.

Elizabeth and Her Mountain Garden

In this essay the author suggests that Elizabeth von Arnim’s anonymous novel In the Mountains (1920) can be regarded as a modernist work, and is best understood in this context. The author indicates why von Arnim was intellectually and spiritually ready to develop her writing along these lines in the post-First World War era. This novel, like von Arnim’s early works—Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899)—is written in the form of a journal; the title, also like those of her early works, points to a symbolic setting derived from nature. However, the narrator of In the Mountains no longer appears as ‘Elizabeth’, but remains mysteriously and completely anonymous. This device, together with von Arnim’s stylistically innovative use of structures and motifs derived from nature and music, as well as her manipulation of time, perception and memory, demonstrates her unique approach to modern writing in this novel, inviting comparison with contemporary works by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

Love Scenes and Garden Plots: Form and Femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden

This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden That I Love (1894). The Garden That I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately, von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat.

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim, Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?

‘So that my soul may have time to grow’: Joy and Happiness in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer

This article discusses the Romantic and Transcendentalist roots of Elizabeth von Arnim’s joyful retreat from the world in The Solitary Summer (1899). By exploring how von Arnim incorporates themes and ideas from William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, it situates von Arnim’s concepts of joy and happiness in the Aristotelian tradition of eudaemonia and shows how the practice of mindfulness turns Elizabeth’s garden into an ongoing project of self-cultivation.

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife: A Reassessment

The Pastor’s Wife (1914) may seem at first reading simply another depiction of a woman struggling for liberation in the decades following the work of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen, being the story of how Ingeborg Bullivant escapes from an English patriarchal home, only to find herself trapped in another one in Germany. The novel, however, marks a turning point in Elizabeth von Arnim’s career; it is a novel that looks back to previous themes while anticipating those to come. It demonstrates, with comedy and bitterness, themes of alienation and exile; satirizes German codes and class; and provides a lyrical Romantic vision of the natural world. It also presents the married woman as a prisoner in a way that anticipates Vera (1921). The novel can also stand alone as an underrated classic that plays an important part in the history of English literature. Published at the beginning of high modernism, it shows, unlike the work of some canonized writers of the time, a fusion of realism and modernism. This essay argues that the novel is a proto-feminist work that is radical in its portrayal of women’s experience and influenced by literary naturalism in its childbirth scenes, but pessimistic about possibilities for change. The essay shows how the novel is modernist in its depiction of the alienated experience of the city; uses nineteenth-century realism in its narrative structure and comedy; and yet is forward-looking in its use of endings. A book that begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy, The Pastor’s Wife deserves equal recognition with the work of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, writers with whom von Arnim was connected and by whom she was influenced.

Reading Elizabeth von Arnim Today: An Overview

Elizabeth von Arnim is usually remembered as a novelist whose comic writing immortalized a leisurely life of privilege among flowers. Her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), and The...

Act Natural: Dubious Proposals in The Mill on the Floss, The Pastor’s Wife, Vera and Rebecca

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. In The Pastor’s Wife (1914) and in Vera (1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) follows Vera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness.

Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.

Isobel Maddison,Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden.

Isobel Maddison,<i>Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden.</i>

Concord Companions: Margaret Fuller, Friendship, and Desire

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the rhetoric of friendship and desire in mid-nineteenth-century American writing. We begin by looking at Emerson’s essay on friendship and Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” (1840) to provide a context for reading Margaret Fuller’s fascinating texts on same-sex bonds between women. Of particular interest to us is Fuller’s translation of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Die Günderode (1840), a collection of letters between Arnim and the German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderode which provides compelling insights into the early to mid-nineteenth-century continuum between female friendship and same-sex desire. We situate this translation alongside Fuller’s own female friendships and expressions of love for women, more specifically her declarations of love to Anna Barker and, later, to George Sand. This latter relationship, we suggest, was a source of admiration and anxiety, for Sand’s cross-dressing and fluid sense of gender identity was simultaneously celebrated and condemned in Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century (1843).

Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden by Isobel Maddison (review)

Reviewed by: Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden by Isobel Maddison Albrecht Classen Isobel Maddison. Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden. Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 273 p. In this well researched monograph Isobel Maddison offers an excellent introduction to the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim and a thorough discussion of her works. Von Arnim was born in 1866 as a member of the Beauchamp family in Australia. She married the German officer Count Henning von Armin-Schlagenthin in 1891 in London. The latter’s maternal grandfather had been a nephew of Frederick the Great, and the couple settled in Nassenheide in Pomerania in 1896. This count might have been a descendent of the famous German Romantic poet Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), but Maddison never even mentions this possibility. Instead, the study is focused entirely on the publications of this successful female writer and her social background. Most impressively, it is the result of extensive archival research and careful interpretive analysis, clearly bringing to life this author and her work. It would be too simplistic, as Maddison emphasizes, to recognize here just a ‘feminist’ writer; instead she urges us to see in von Arnim a satirical author who critically examined her society and the tensions among the various social classes. She attracted a wide readership, although, or just because, she voiced considerable criticism of the social constraints at her time. In order to do justice to von Arnim’s accomplishments, Maddison carefully investigates the social, historical, and literary context and background relevant both for the author and for her individual texts. Apparently, as she can unearth, von Arnim was exceedingly well connected with many important writers of her time, so this study sheds good light on other contemporary literature. The entire third chapter is dedicated to the relationship with Katherine Mansfield. Curiously, however, as Maddison observes, von Arnim did not always receive positive reviews, especially if we think of Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West. Nevertheless, as this study demonstrates, von Arnim proves to have been a solid author who had much to say to her audience, and was certainly an important contributor to contemporary literature, living partly in Germany, partly in England, representing a transcultural experience, as we would say today. Nevertheless, as many of her personal statements indicate, she had little positive to say about the Germans at [End Page 101] large and mostly embraced stereotypical views imbibed from British propaganda in the wake of the First World War. Some of von Arnim’s novels also reflect the relationship between Germany and the United States, such as Christopher and Columbus (1919) Much of Maddison’s discussions pertain to a close reading of von Arnim’s texts, adding comments from reviewers, while critical opinions by contemporary scholars seem to be missing here to some extent. I list just a few from recent years: Juliane Roemhild, “Beauty’s Price: Femininity as an Aesthetic Commodity in Elizabeth’s von Arnim’s Novels,” Cahiers Victoriens 75 (2012): 31-39; Amy Mullin, “Narrative, Emotions, and Autonomy,” Narrative, Emotion, Insight, ed. Noël Carrol and John Gibson (University Park: PA State U, 2011), 92-108; or Sara Ann Wider, “‘And What Became of Your Philosophy Then?’: Women Reading Walden,” More Day to Dawn, ed. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis et al. (Amherst, MA: U of MA Press, 2007), 152-70. The bibliography is arranged in such a peculiar fashion that the reader has a hard time figuring out the system. Pleasantly, the volume concludes with an index. Most important, Maddison has put together an appendix with an accurate overview of the relevant papers by the author, from 1890 to 1962, a finding aid. While the introductory chapter with its biographical sketch proves to be most helpful, I am missing a conclusion or an epilogue in which the various aspects discussed here would have been pulled together. Nevertheless, altogether this monograph represents a major step forward in research on Elizabeth von Arnim, both because of the good close reading of the primary texts and because of the solid appendix detailing the source materials in the personal papers. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona Copyright © 2014 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association