Left alone each spring and summer on her husband’s German country estate, however, Mary had quickly found country life, marriage, and motherhood exceedingly tedious, and in 1898 shockingly said as much in her bitingly humorous, anonymously published first novel, the autobiographical Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Born Mary Annette Beauchamp in 1866 Australia, she had come of age in Victorian London, married the Prussian aristocrat Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin (whom she’d met on an Italian holiday), and dutifully bore him three children in three years. The more I learned about “Elizabeth von Arnim,” the deeper the novel became. Still, I obligingly gave it a read - more out of courtesy than interest - and just like seven decades of readers before me, crumbled completely to the charms of both the tale told and its author’s captivating, stingingly witty voice. And the name Elizabeth von Arnim, despite a bio claiming two dozen popular novels, drew a blank. The jacket copy, all about sisterhood under the Italian sun, didn’t strike me as anything anyone would even remotely connect with me. There were flowers on the book jacket - not a good sign. I was first given the novel The Enchanted April by a theater director and friend proposing a stage adaptation.
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