Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Joyce Morgan, Allen & Unwin, $32.99.
This book is the never before told story of Australian-born international literary sensation, Elizabeth von Arnim, who beguiled the world. She was mysterious, free-spirited, an international bestselling author and a member of the glamorous erudite, intellectual and society salons of late 19th and early 20th century London and Europe. This was one woman who lived during glamorous, exciting and changing times that spanned the innocence of Victorian Sydney and finished with the march of Hitler through Europe.
She was ‘amused, cynical, ironic, loving, gay, ferocious, cold, ardent but never gentle’. She was a whirlwind. She created around her the atmosphere of a court at which her friends were either in disgrace or favour, a butt or a blessing.
Elizabeth von Arnim may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy.
It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen.
Admired by Virginia Woolf, here are some interesting facts about Elizabeth. She became Countess von Arnim when she married a Prussian Count, and had five children in Germany. She was widowed in 1910, and there was a turbulent relationship with H.G. Wells.
Elizabeth’s second marriage was to Bertrand Russell’s brother, Frank, and counts Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Lady Maud Cunard and Nancy Astor among her close friends.
Joyce Morgan brings Elizabeth’s incredible and fascinating story to pulsating life!
