This is actually one of von Arnim’s darker works in my opinion. But it's well told and I'm left wanting to read more by von Arnim. She has an affair with a H G Wells type character(this I believe an autobiographical part of the novel), that relationship breaks down, the local (Jewish) Doctor has to step in and advise the husband that further conjugal relations are inadvisable on grounds of the wife's health. She is disapproved of by Prussian society, and in particular by her Mother-in-law (the mother-in-law is a fantastically sinister figure) and has children until her health suffers. Young woman, the daughter of a bishop, is proposed to while on holiday and because she can't manage to say no, winds up married to an older Prussian Pastor. The novel has a deceptively light tone that enables her to talk easily about troubled and difficult marriages - this is a book written in the early years of the 20th century as well as a book that drew on her experience of her own marriage. I picked this up, probably just because it was cheap but was left wondering why I hadn't heard of Elizabeth von Arnim before. When World War II broke out she permanently took up residence in the United States, where she died in 1941, aged 74.

She was a cousin of Katherine Mansfield (whose full name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp).Įlizabeth von Arnim spent her old age in London, Switzerland, and on the French Riviera. The marriage ended in disaster, with Elizabeth escaping to the United States and the couple finally agreeing, in 1919, to get a divorce. Von Arnim wrote another 20 books, which were all published 'By the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden'.Ĭount von Arnim died in 1910, and in 1916 Elizabeth married John Francis Stanley Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, Bertrand Russell's elder brother.

In 1898 she started her literary career by publishing Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a semi-autobiographical novel about a rural idyll published anonymously and, as it turned out to be highly successful, reprinted 21 times within the first year. The children's tutors at Nassenheide included E. The couple had five children, four daughters and a son. They married in London but lived in Berlin and eventually moved to the countryside where, in Nassenheide, Pomerania, the von Arnims had their family estate. She had met von Arnim during an Italian tour with her father. Elizabeth, Countess Russell, was a British novelist and, through marriage, a member of the German nobility, known as Mary Annette Gräfin von Arnim.īorn Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, she was raised in England and in 1891 married Count Henning August von Arnim, a Prussian aristocrat, and the great-great-great-grandson of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia.

Father by Elizabeth von Arnim