This is a book loaned to me by my Mum. She insisted I had to read it and a good thing too, as it turns out. Let’s just ignore the fact that I’d not heard of Elizabeth von Arnim until I read the book. Born on the shores of Sydney Harbour in 1866 under the name of Mary Annette Beauchamp, she died in the USA in 1941. She published her first books using the name of Elizabeth without a surname and eventually took on Elizabeth as her first name.
In order to write this book Morgan read many letters from her to family members spread around the world, to other writers and many friends. She was cousin to Katherine Manfield and friends with E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells. She dove into various archives including various newspapers. Elizabeth’s journals and correspondence are mostly stored by the Huntington Library. There are copious notes at the back of this book so you can do some of your own research to read more detail, if that’s what you want to do.
Past the details, though. This book is well written, it has a good flow and I had no trouble reading it. Maybe that’s not a good thing for me at this moment. I do wonder if I’d had more sleep that week then I might not have ended up with shingles. But that’s a bit of a copout trying to blame my shingles on a book, so I’m not really doing that, even though it sounds like it.
I’m finding it hard to write about the book and not regurgitate sections that I’m reading. I’d suggest the shingles is addling my brain. It means you only get about 400 words from me tonight. Easier reading for you.
I do want to say it was thoroughly fascinating reading about the rise of Hitler through the eyes of a writer. She seemed to have understood what was actually going to happen and did her best to persuade her children to leave Germany. They had some Jewish ancestry and that was not a safe thing to have in Germany from 1933 to the end of WWII.
I do recommend this book. It’s a great read and you’ll learn so much.