Enchanted April, at 100 years

 

The Enchanted April / Elizabeth von Arnim
NY: NYRB, 2007, c1922
247 p.

The beginning of 2023 has been speeding by, but I finally have a chance to sit down and talk about the book that I finished out 2022 with! I wanted to reread The Enchanted April in 2022, and it was the hundred-year anniversary of its publication - and I just squeezed it in. 

I've mentioned my fondness for this book before, but have never given it a proper review. Rereading it, this time a bit older, brought out new elements for me, and I also realized the clever use of wordplay and characterization in the book that gets a little lost in the movie -- even if that movie is one of my favourite book-to-film adaptations ever. 

In any case, if you don't know Elizabeth von Arnim's work, this is probably her most famous novel, alongside her somewhat fictionalized memoir Elizabeth and her German Garden. It's also one of her sunniest stories, with a heartwarming conclusion and lots of beauty and joy involved, even if some things aren't always happy in the characters' lives. Von Arnim has a sharp eye for unhappiness and the small moments of interpersonal clashes, and that all shows here. Each character has a depth to their misery, hidden under their socially acceptable shells. But the somewhat strange situation the four women who are our main characters find themselves in - sharing a castle in Italy for the month, even though initially strangers - breaks down the social constraints between these women of different classes. There's Lottie Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot, both middle class women fed up with being subservient wives and ladies, and Lady Caroline Dester, a young aristocratic beauty sick of being pawed by men, and then there is Mrs. Fisher, an 'old' woman of 65 who lives in the past and her memories of Great Men. 

Italy itself and all its warmth and beauty, softens their hearts and makes the prickly people and situations of rainy England melt away. Lottie, the heart of the book and of the quartet, expands with joy and love, and quickly writes to invite her husband to join them even though he was what she was trying to get away from. This throws the other women into a bit of upset, with each feeling their own reasons for not wanting a husband there. 

But all is well, with humour and friendships and understandings all blossoming, until there is a perfect happy ending. In the movie, this ending leaves the viewer happy, peaceful and believing in miracles. The book, while also ending happily, also leaves you with a sense that perhaps this Italian idyll is made just for San Salvatore and will not travel with the holidayers as they leave. But one can hope...

In any case, this is one of my favourite and most reread Von Arnim books, and if you haven't really explored her before, I would recommend this one for sure. There are others that I also love, and only a couple that I don't, and I hope that you'll also develop a fondness for this clever and acerbic writer too.