Elizabeth decides she wants to spend a summer in solitude, which her husband (always referred to as the Man of Wrath even though he comes off as fairly genial in a stoic German sort of way) thinks will be a disaster. By "solitary," she doesn't mean she wants to be entirely alone all summer. She just means she doesn't want to invite people out to stay at their German manor all the time. She wants one summer with only her husband and children and servants around, to enjoy their home life, basically.
The bulk of the book is her funny and insightful musings throughout the summer (and into the fall) about books, solitude, nature, gardening, and family life. I didn't love this quite as much as Garden thanks to an extended section about the immorality of village young people, which felt more snide than funny. But it's definitely a book I'll be rereading. It did make me laugh aloud repeatedly. I tried to read it entirely outside, mostly on my swing in our back yard, though I also read it on a bench outside my daughter's ballet studio a few times.
Elizabeth von Arnim was the pen name of Countess Mary Annette von Arnim-Schlagenthin, an Australian who married into the German aristocracy and used a pen name so as not to scandalize her in-laws. While the character of Elizabeth is loosely based on herself, just as Elizabeth's husband the Man of Wrath is loosely based on Count von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and the children described here are presumably based on their children. But what she recounts in the book is pretty much fiction presented as fact.
Particularly Good Bits:
...how can you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great deal into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if you try forever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has not got it in him to be happy.
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.
I believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the stoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simple expedient of turning your face to the fire, but when you have no fire, and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and a dreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blank corners of your heart.
And was there every such a hopeful beginning to a day, and so full of promise for the subsequent right passing of its hours, as breakfast in the garden, alone with your teapot and your book!
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10, mainly for the aforementioned part about immoral villagers who go around getting pregnant out of wedlock and getting married later and seem to think this is fine. It's not salacious at all.
This has been my 31st book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, and my 23rd from my TBR shelves for the 2024 Mount TBR Challenge.
