Growing in grace

© C A Lovegrove.

Elizabeth and her German Garden
by Elizabeth von Arnim.
Introduction by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Virago Press, 1985 (1898).

May 16th.—’The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel, it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover.’

First published anonymously in 1898, and quickly becoming a bestseller, Elizabeth and her German Garden remains a delightful piece of autofiction by the woman who was born Mary Annette Beauchamp, called May by her family but best known today as Elizabeth von Arnim.

Aged 24, May married the widowed Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin in 1890, and after a few years languishing in stuffy Berlin society managed to persuade her reluctant husband to spend more time at the family’s Pomeranian estate of Nassenheide (now part of Rzędziny village and located in Poland).

Here the young woman was to spend much of her time alone (‘alone’ only if we discount her three daughters, governess and resident staff) planning and planting her English-style garden in what was then part of Germany. The literary upshot was that she published a novel thinly disguised as a faux memoir faintly echoing Gothic fiction, using her experiences as basic material but excluding the kinds of details that would identify her real-life husband as the old-fashioned Man of Wrath.