Elizabeth von Arnim


Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was an Australian-born British novelist. She married a German aristocrat and her best-known works are set in Germany. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H.G. Wells, then later married Frank Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winning writer and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth Russell, Countess Russell. Though known in early life as Mary, publication of her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to her friends and finally even to her family. She is now known invariably as Elizabeth von Arnim. She used the pen name Alice Cholmondeley only for the novel Christine, published in 1917.

Biography

She was born at her family's holiday home in Kirribilli Point in Sydney, Australia. Her parents were Henry Herron Beauchamp, a wealthy shipping merchant, and Elizabeth Weiss Lassetter. She was called 'May' by her family and she had four brothers and a sister. One of her second cousins was the New Zealand-born Kathleen Beauchamp, who wrote under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was three years old, the family moved to England, where they lived in London, but also spent several years in Switzerland.
Von Arnim was a first cousin of Mansfield's father, Harold Beauchamp, making the two women first cousins, once removed. Although Elizabeth was older by 22 years, she and Mansfield later corresponded, reviewed each others works and became close. Mansfield, ill with tuberculosis, lived in the Montana region of Switzerland from May 1921 until January 1922, renting the Chalet de Sapins with her husband John Middleton Murry from June 1921. The house was only a "1/2 an hour's scramble away" from von Arnim's Chalet Soleil at Randogne. Von Arnim visited her cousin often during this period. They got on well, although Mansfield considered the much wealthier von Arnim to be patronising. Mansfield satirised von Arnim as the character Rosemary in a short story, "A Cup of Tea", which she wrote while in Switzerland.
She studied at the Royal College of Music, principally learning the organ.
On 21 February 1891, Elizabeth married the widowed German aristocrat in London, whom she had met on a tour of Italy with her father two year earlier. They lived in Berlin initially and in 1896 moved to what was then Nassenheide, Pomerania, where the von Arnims had their family estate.
The couple had four daughters and a son. Their tutors at Nassenheide included E. M. Forster, who worked there for several months in the spring and summer of 1905. Forster wrote a short memoir of the months he spent there. From April to July 1907 the writer Hugh Walpole was their tutor.
In 1907, Count von Arnim was imprisoned for fraud, and in 1908 Elizabeth moved to London with the children. The couple did not consider this a formal separation, although the marriage had been unhappy due to the Count's affairs and they had slept in separate bedrooms for some time. In 1910, financial problems meant the Nassenheide estate had to be sold. Later that year Count von Arnim died in Bad Kissingen, with his wife and three of their daughters by his side. In 1911, Elizabeth moved to Randogne, Switzerland, where she built the Chalet Soleil and entertained literary and society friends. From 1910 until 1913, she was a mistress of the novelist H.G. Wells.
The von Arnim's daughter Felicitas, who had been at boarding school in Switzerland and later in Germany, died of pneumonia aged 16 in 1916, in Bremen. She had been unable to return to England due to restrictions caused by World War I travel and financial controls.
Von Armin married Frank Russell, the second Earl Russell and elder brother of Bertrand Russell, in 1916. The marriage ended in acrimony, with the couple separating in 1919, although they never divorced. She then went to the United States, where her daughters Liebet and Evi were living. In 1920 she returned to her home in Switzerland, using it as a base for frequent trips to other parts of Europe. In the same year she embarked on an affair with Alexander Stuart Frere, who later became chairman of the publisher Heinemann. He was 26 years her junior. He initially went to stay at the Chalet Soleil to catalogue her large library, and romance ensued. The affair lasted several years. In 1927 he married Patricia Wallace Frere, and named his only daughter Elizabeth in von Arnim's honour.
In 1930, she set up home in Mougins in the south of France, seeking a warmer climate. She created a rose garden there and called the house Mas des Roses. She continued to entertain her social and literary circle there, as she had done in Switzerland. She retained this house to the end of her life, although she moved to the United States in 1939 at the beginning of World War II. She died of influenza at the Riverside Infirmary, Charleston, South Carolina, on 9 February 1941, aged 74, and was cremated at Fort Lincoln cemetery, Maryland. In 1947 her ashes were mingled with those of her brother, Sir Sydney Beauchamp, in the churchyard of St Margaret's, Tylers Green, Penn, Buckinghamshire. The Latin inscription on her tombstone reads, parva sed apta, alluding to her short stature.

Literary career

Arnim would later refer to her domineering first husband by the Biblical title the "Man of Wrath" and writing became a refuge from what turned out to be an incompatible marriage. Arnim's husband's increasing debts eventually sent him to prison for fraud. This was when she created her pen name "Elizabeth" and launched her career as a writer with her semi-autobiographical, brooding, yet satirical Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Detailing the protagonist Elizabeth's struggles to create a garden on the estate and her attempts to integrate into German aristocratic Junker society, it was such a success that it was reprinted twenty times by May 1899, a year after its publication. A bitter-sweet memoir and companion to it was The Solitary Summer.
Other works, such as The Benefactress, The Adventures of Elizabeth on Rügen, Vera, and Love, were also semi-autobiographical. Some titles ensued that deal with protest against domineering Junkerdom and witty observations of life in provincial Germany, including The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight and Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther. She would sign her twenty or so books, after the first, initially as "by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden" and later simply "By Elizabeth".
Although she never wrote a traditional autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life, a 1936 account of her love for her pets, contains many glimpses of her glittering social circle.

Reception

Arnim's 1921 novel, Vera, a dark tragi-comedy drawing on her disastrous marriage to Earl Russell, was her most critically acclaimed work, described by John Middleton Murry as "Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen".
Her 1922 work, The Enchanted April, inspired by a month-long holiday to the Italian Riviera, is perhaps the lightest and most ebullient of her novels. It has regularly been adapted for the stage and screen: as a Broadway play in 1925 a 1935 American feature film, an Academy Award-nominated feature film in 1992, a Tony Award-nominated stage play in 2003, a musical play in 2010, and in 2015 a serial on BBC Radio 4. Terence de Vere White credits The Enchanted April with making the Italian resort of Portofino fashionable. It is also, probably, the most widely read of all her work, having been a Book-of-the-Month club choice in America upon publication.
Her 1940 novel Mr. Skeffington, was made into an Academy Award-nominated feature film by Warner Bros. in 1944, starring Bette Davis and Claude Rains, and a 60-minute "Lux Radio Theater" broadcast radio adaptation of the movie on 1 October 1945.
Since 1983, the British publisher, Virago, has been reprinting her work with new introductions by modern writers, some of which try to claim her as a feminist. The Reader's Encyclopedia reports that many of her later novels are "tired exercises", but this opinion is not widely held.
Perhaps the best example of von Arnim's mordant wit and unusual attitude to life, is provided in one her letters: "I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather."

Select bibliography

for April Baby's Book of Tunes, 1900