Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden

by Isobel Maddison

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Felicity · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book brings to mind the advice of a representative of a well-known academic publisher: we do not want your Ph.D thesis; be prepared to rewrite and revise it before submission. The trouble with Maddison's monograph, released by a different publishing house, is that it reads like an unreconstructed dissertation displaying ample evidence of archival research and primary and secondary printed sources to satisfy an external examiner. The author's pursuit of the reception of the novelist's work through contemporary reviews and subsequent critical readings is conducted with admirable diligence and woeful dulness, largely attributable to the dry academic house style of writing. In her defence of Elizabeth's witty 'feminine middlebrow' fiction against the charge of triviality she has produced a ponderous study in the fluctuating fortunes of a writer's reputation. One of the rare occasions of light relief is provided by E.M. Forster, sometime tutor to Von Arnim's children, whose recollection of the German garden that inspired her best-known book reduced to 'some flowers -- mainly pansies, tulips, roses ... and endless lupins' (59). Elizabeth may not have been the self-styled wild gardener, but her writing flourished with her characteristic light touch. Had Maddison paid as much attention to her own expression as to Von Arnim's oft-cited 'critical lexis' she would have produced a more readable study of Elizabeth's work. Perhaps she feared the female academic's fate of trivialisation by the literary squirearchy.