Elizabeth von Arnim was not a garden writer, but she was a writer whose garden made her famous — as well as being the source of her name. She is now most famous for her novel The Enchanted April, which was made into a 1991 movie featuring Joan Plowright, Polly Walker, Miranda Richardson, and Josie Lawrence, but von Arnim shot to prominence with her debut novel Elizabeth and her German Garden, a gentle satire that chronicles her free-spirited heroine’s attempts to create a perfect garden as she struggles to navigate the aristocratic German Junker culture she has married into.
Von Arnim’s biography reads like that of a romance novelist — or even a romance novel’s heroine. Born in Australia as Mary Annette Beauchamp, she married a German aristocrat, making her the Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin. She was also a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Though known in early life as May, her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which eventually led to her writings being ascribed to Elizabeth von Arnim.
Alas, Henning’s Junker-like predilections caught up with him, causing a disturbance in the couple’s idyllic lifestyle. “Sept. 2,” says the real Elizabeth’s surviving diary, “a windy sunny day and all the marigolds in flower. He was going shooting rabbits after lunch. Instead he ended up in prison.” Henning, her husband, had been typically overbearing to a subordinate in his bank. In return, the victim denounced him for forging documents. The fraud case collapsed, but only after Henning had spent months in jail.
Elizabeth remained loyal to her husband, but after his death in 1910, she moved to England, where she embarked on a three-year affair with H.G. Wells, followed by a disastrous marriage to Lord Frank Russell — the elder brother of the Nobel prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell — who was appalled to discover that Elizabeth had prudently placed Henning’s fortune, which Russell assumed he would control, in trust for her children instead. A bridge addict, Francis alternated between neglecting Elizabeth with long nights at cards at his club and a mercurial control over family life, which caused Elizabeth to eventually flee her disintegrating marriage.
Elizabeth’s Byrdcliffe connection began in 1916 with that flight from her abusive husband during the height of WWI. In suitably dramatic style, on the first day out, her ship was chased by a German submarine, an episode that appear in one of the books in the Byrdcliffe library, Christopher and Columbus. Elizabeth arrived at New York after a fraught eight-day crossing, to be greeted by her daughter, Liebet, and Liebet’s friend, Mrs. Jane Whitehead. Elizabeth spent her first night on American soil at Jane’s club (presumably the Colony, although I have yet to verify this). From there, Elizabeth and Liebet journeyed to Byrdcliffe to spend the next two weeks in a cabin loaned to them by the Whiteheads. (I have yet to determine which cottage it was. The only description I have found was that it was “chalet style.”)
Inspired by the Whiteheads’ descriptions of Arcady, both Elizabeth and her daughter across the country to California, where Russell eventually caught up with them. But Elizabeth proved herself a woman not to be denied. After all, a woman who evaded U-boats had little to fear from an angry bridge player. The couple remained married, but in name only, and Elizabeth continued to write best-selling novels for the next 15 years.
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