Elizabeth And Her German Garden (Virago Modern Classics)

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The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. It is an idyllic life made possible by her privileged background and access to governesses, maid servants, and itinerant gardeners.

She had three little children, whom she referred to as the April baby, the May baby and the June baby.Her first best-selling work of fiction, Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), launched a long and distinguished writing career.

In fact, from reading the novel I would have thought her an aristocratic German raised, as many were, by English and French governesses. Gardening and writing became her means of escape while struggling to find a foothold in the foreign culture of the high-class German society to which her husband belonged. Her silly little snobberies are not amusing or pleasant to a 21st century reader, She is a self-absorbed and not very kind person, apparently unaware of her life of tremendous privilege.No – ha replicato lui assennatamente; – no, il tuo giardino non è il tuo Dovere, perché è il tuo Piacere. As usual in a number of places von Arnim had me chuckling such as in this passage in which Elizabeth and two women who are staying at her house for a while are having a picnic outside in the dead of winter and one of the visitors is freezing her butt off. Besides, they had a knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in them just when I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of the library with them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to get well drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat for roses is poison for books.