Elizabeth decides she wants to take a little vacation by herself to the quaint and charming island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. She would like to walk all the way around the island, but none of her friends are willing to undertake walking all the way around a fairly large island, and her husband says that wouldn't be practical OR proper, so instead, she takes a cart and driver and her faithful maidservant Gertrud and determines to drive all the way around the island.
Like in the previous two books, people and circumstances conspire to prevent her from wholly and completely accomplishing her goal. Elizabeth perseveres. She sometimes loses her natural good spirits just a little, but recovers them before long. And her writing made me laugh aloud repeatedly, just as I hoped it would.
I liked the first part best, when it's just Elizabeth and Gertrud and the driver, and the only things that spoil Elizabeth's plans are things like hotels having no vacancies. Once she met up with her odd cousin Charlotte, things turned almost a little screwball here and there, with the mishaps and misunderstandings piling up a bit too quickly for my taste. Also, there were a lot fewer passages describing and appreciating the beauty of the world around her, which are something I absolutely love in von Arnim's books.
Overall, I'll totally read it again, but not as often as Elizabeth and Her German Garden.
Particularly Good Bits:
If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside (p. 3).
Admirable virtue of silence, most precious, because most rare, jewel in the crown of female excellences (p. 5).
Every instant of happiness is a priceless possession for ever (p. 20).
As soon as there are no trains to catch a journey becomes magnificently simple (p. 35).
Why not take the beauty and be grateful? (p. 36).
What had I been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it, and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures, neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows (p. 42).
You need not, after all, let your vision be blocked entirely by the person with whom you chance to live; however vast his intellectual bulk may be, you can look round him and see that the stars and the sky are still there, and you need not run away from him to do that (p. 44).
I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just pat, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars (p. 59).
...the forest was so exquisite that way, the afternoon so serene, so mellow with lovely light, that I could not look round me without being happy. Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and grass, sea and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any other earthly possession. And I think of Wordsworth, its divine singer, who yet lost it so soon and could no longer see the splendour in the grass, the glory in in the flower, and I ask myself with a sinking heart if it faded so quickly for him who saw it and sang it by God's grace to such perfection, how long, oh how long does the common soul, half blind, half dead, half dumb, keep its little, precious share? (p. 72).
How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills! Motionless we stood before this sudden unrolling of the beauty of God's earth. The place seemed full of a serene and mighty Presence (p. 109).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG. Completely clean in every way.
