The Enchanted April (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition)

by Elizabeth von Arnim

the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty.

years she had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness.

And I can see you’ve been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy”—Mrs.

“It only shows,” said Mrs. Wilkins in a whisper, as they turned away from the letter-box, “how immaculately good we’ve been all our lives. The very first time we do anything our husbands don’t know about we feel guilty.”

And she was always gentle, and anxious that his coffee should be as he liked it.

She had loved Frederick too deeply to be able now to do anything but pray for him.

To be missed, to be needed, from whatever motive, was, she thought, better than the complete loneliness of not being missed or needed at all.

Because always pain had been close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts, to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.

go away alone was bad; to think was worse. No good could come out of the thinking of a beautiful young woman.

True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled, not because they were happy but because they

wished to make happy.

Presently she wouldn’t be beautiful, and what then? Scrap didn’t know what then, it appalled her to wonder even. Tired as she was of being conspicuous she was at least used to that, she had never known anything else; and to become inconspicuous, to fade, to grow shabby and dim, would probably be most painful.

Women’s heads weren’t made for thinking, I assure you.

For the first time in her life she was surrounded by perfect beauty, and her one thought was to show it to him, to share it with him. She wanted Frederick. She yearned for Frederick. Ah, if only, only Frederick…

Rose’s own experience was that goodness, the state of being good, was only reached with difficulty and pain.

Much patience and self-effacement were needed for successful married sleep. Placidity; a steady faith; these too were needed. She was sure she would be much fonder of Mellersh, and he not mind her nearly so much, if they were not shut up together at night, if in the morning they could meet with the cheery affection of friends between whom lies no shadow of differences about the window or the washing arrangements, or of absurd little choked-down resentments at something that had seemed to one of them unfair.

And the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more Lotty expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected in his turn, became really very nice himself; so that they went round and round, not in a vicious but in a highly virtuous circle.

true she liked him most when he wasn’t there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren’t there.

A man in his profession could be immensely helped by a clever and attractive wife. Why had she not been attractive sooner? Why this sudden flowering?

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice.

Rose was astonished. How nice people really were. When would she leave off making mistakes about them? She hadn’t suspected this side of Mrs. Fisher, and she began to wonder whether those other sides of her with which alone she was acquainted had not perhaps after all been the effect of her own militant and irritating behaviour. Probably they were. How horrid, then, she must have been. She felt very penitent when she saw Mrs. Fisher beneath her eyes blossoming out into real amiability the moment some one came along who was charming to her, and she could have sunk into the ground with shame when Mrs. Fisher presently laughed, and she realized by the shock it gave her that the sound was entirely new.

“Upon my word,” thought Mrs. Fisher, “the way one pretty face can turn a delightful man into an idiot is past all patience.”

“It’s a great thing,” whispered Lotty after a pause, during which they both watched Rose’s upturned face, “to get on with one’s loving. Perhaps you can tell me of anything else in the world that works such wonders.”

Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful…

“Rose sees through all that. That’s mere trimmings. She sees what we can’t see, because she loves him.”

adored you before because of your beauty. Now I adore you because you’re not only as beautiful as a dream but as decent as a man.”

the rarest, most precious of combinations,” said Frederick, “to be a woman and have the loyalty of a man.” “Is it?” smiled

“Poor old dear,” she thought, all the loneliness of age flashing upon her, the loneliness of having outstayed one’s welcome in the world, of being in it only on sufferance, the complete loneliness of the old childless woman who has failed to make friends.

It did seem that people could only be really happy in pairs—any sorts of pairs, not in the least necessarily lovers, but pairs of friends, pairs of mothers and children, of brothers and sisters—and where was the other half of Mrs. Fisher’s pair going to be found?

reveal something to these women that is at once a deep part of themselves and an obstacle to who they can truly be. Happiness, in von Arnim’s deft treatment, is not self-indulgence, mindless pleasure, or the absence of misery. It also cannot be reduced to fleeting moments of levity that soon sink back into the humdrum of daily life. Happiness for these four women means an encounter with one’s true self.

The step into happiness might occur in a garden drenched with the scent of acacias and lilac, but for each of the four characters it leads over the momentary abyss of no longer knowing who they are, what they signify to others, and what their new self will mean to them.

Once each of the four women realizes how she participated in her own unhappiness, and how she was unconsciously attached to her own misery as a way of feeling safe, each of them is set

first insight is that our opportunities for happiness are as often obscured by our needs for acceptance, security, approval, as they are frequently blocked by external circumstances. Her second insight is that happiness is created and not found, and that it is a

matter of becoming rather than a state of being.

the momentary experience of being taken out of ourselves, which is available to each of us through the experience of falling in love, through encounters with beauty in art and nature, and through the rare event when our efforts are no longer directed at an intended outcome but assume their own rhythm and flow, where effort, intention, and outcome are strangely conjoined.

women in The Enchanted April has been taught and socialized to distrust her sense of contentment and to chastise herself for self-indulgence, frivolity, and even immorality as soon as she feels joy.

In order to be happy, we must allow ourselves to be moved beyond ourselves to re-encounter another sense of ourselves, rather than losing our sense of self in whatever we pursue. Life constantly opens small doorways into happiness.

routinely overlook small moments of joy in search of something presumably greater, lasting, and profound. We regularly fail to realize that happiness can be found in tiny instances of joy.

But we can recall, train, and practice this awareness to draw on it when things are looking down. This does not mean trying to talk oneself into happiness during moments of misery. It means recognizing that such perio...