2004-2005 Season: Enchanted April
About Elizabeth von Arnim
The following is excerpted from Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Introduction to The Folio Society edition of The Enchanted April, 2002. Elizabeth von Arnim is the author of the novel The Enchanted April, upon which this play is based.
Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp (called May by her family) in 1866, the youngest child of Hendry and Louey Beauchamp. Her parents settled in London when May was three and a half, and she attended classes at a girls’ school where music was prominent on the curriculum. At eighteen she became a student at the Royal College of Music, and at twenty-three, took her first trip to Italy with her father.
It was in Italy that May met her first husband, the German Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin who was traveling to get over the death of his wife and child the previous year. They were married and settled in Berlin, where May produced three daughters and endured a life of social obligations that included Court functions bristling with protocol—it seems then that she became translated into Elizabeth. She was homesick, restless and bored.
Then, in the spring of 1896, she accompanied her husband on one of his rare visits to his enormous Pomeranian estate, Nassenheide, ninety miles north of Berlin. The estate was centered upon a large 17th century schloss that had once been a convent and had been unoccupied for the previous twenty-five years. It was surrounded by a vast, rambling and derelict garden, and the moment she saw it, Elizabeth knew that she wanted to live there. Here was freedom and peace, a natural isolation from the soul-destroying life in Berlin; she spent three blissful months alone there from April till June, until her aggrieved husband arrived to rebuke her for her neglect of the family and himself.
In spite of some difficulty in persuading von Arnim, she got his partial agreement to live at Nassenheide during the summer months where she wrote her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden, which had an immediate and resounding success. Her career as a novelist had begun.
In ten years of marriage to von Arnim she bore him three daughters and then the longed-for son and was widowed in 1911. There followed an affair with H.G. Wells and then a brief and most unhappy marriage to Francis, Lord Russell, brother of Bertrand Russell. The best that that came out of this disastrous liaison, during which Elizabeth was kept a virtual prisoner in Russell’s house until she ran away to America, was the novel she subsequently wrote about the marriage, Vera.
In April 1921, after she had finished Vera, she went with a woman friend to Italy, where, in Portofino, she found a medieval castle that she could rent for a month. Another woman friend was added to the party. “You’ve not heard from me for ages,” she wrote to her daughter. “I think while I was at Portofino that month I didn’t write, but that was because I grudged every single moment spent indoors, it was so wildly, ridiculously, divinely beautiful.” In 1922 she wrote The Enchanted April.
Other novels by Elizabeth von Arnim include:
Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther, The Pastor’s Wife, Love, The Caravaners, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen and The Solitary Summer.
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