The Enchanted April is the ultimate comfort read, to the point where I’m almost disappointed that I read it in the summertime rather than the middle of winter, because I love the idea of reading this book while huddled under blankets during a snowstorm. This is the story of four British women in 1922 who rent an Italian villa for a month.

That’s it! That’s the book! Just four nice ladies who are kind of unhappy with their lives decide to go on vacation. Aside from their unhappy marriages (and it’s really just boredom – there’s nothing more malicious than that), there is virtually no conflict! Just lovely descriptions of Italian countryside and blooming flowers and relaxing on various balconies and parapets.

The four women of the story don’t know each other when the book starts. Two characters – Lottie and Rose – belong to the same London women’s club, and happen to both see the same advertisement for an Italian castle that can be rented for a month. They decide to pool their resources to rent it and, because they can’t quite afford it on their own, put out an ad of their own to get two more renters. They end up with Mrs. Fisher, a spinster who wants a quiet vacation where she can be left alone; and Lady Caroline Dester, who wants to get away from her usual crowd of Bright Young Things. In short, these are four women who just want some peace and quiet, dammit, so they all end up sharing an Italian castle for a month. Are you charmed yet?!

My only gripe with this book is this: along with Under the Tuscan Sun, it can be shelved under Stories About Unhappy Women Who Go To Italy To Find Themselves But Don’t Realize They’re Lesbians.

Like I understand that Elizabeth von Arnim was writing in the 1920s and couldn’t make these women overtly gay, but it makes SO MUCH SENSE. They’re unhappy in their marriages to their boring husbands! They’re always kissing each other and saying how much they love each other! They just want to sit in the sunshine surrounded by beautiful things and never have to speak to another man!

Of course, it’s 1922 and we can’t have them starting a lesbian commune in rural Italy. Lottie and Rose’s husbands join the vacation eventually, and everyone falls back in love and it’s all very wonderful. The spinster lady doesn’t get a man because she’s too old and having friends is meant to be her consolation prize; meanwhile poor Lady Caroline gets paired off with the first single man to wander into the narrative, and von Arnim has to work overtime to convince us that this makes sense. Like…it would have been so much easier to just make them all gay, Elizabeth. Just make it gay.

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine.”

This was a lovely book about four English women who answer an advertisement to rent an Italian chateau in San Salvatore,Italy during a dismal April in England. The advertisement seems to be a godsend to these women, whose lives are not going the way they had hoped. As the title word “enchanted” implies, the story does have a slight fairytale-like aura to it, but not annoyingly so.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book so much, on the outset it looked like it would be an extremely slow read. However, it turned out to be very enjoyable. Elizabeth Von Armin is a masterful storyteller. Her writing is beautiful and witty. Also, for a floraphile such as myself, her descriptions of flowers were heavenly:

“The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour.”

Additionally, as a person whose life has been changed by travel, I think this book is a great advertisement for travelling to renew your soul and learn more about yourself and others.

My first Von Armin and it definitely won’t be my last. Highly recommended.

What I learned from this book (in no particular order):

1.tSpring in Hampstead is depressing. Italian trains are always late.

2.tEating macaroni with a knife, even though it is of the wormy, stringy variety, is an insult to a proper Italian cook.

3.tOther people’s chills are always the fruit of folly, and the worst thing that could happen is that if they are handed on to you, who had done nothing at all to deserve them.

4.tBeing too sexy for your own good is hazardous to your mental health.

5.tClothes that are infested with thrift make you practically invisible.

6.tIt is difficult to be improper without men around.

7.tThere were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings.

8.tYou shall only write books that God would read. Books about long-dead mistresses are NOT something that HE would read.

9.tThere are miserable sorts of goodness and happy sorts --- the sort you’ll have at a flower-bedecked medieval Italian castle by the sea, for instance, is the happy sort.

10.tA flower-bedecked Italian castle by the sea can repair the most broken of marriages and induce you to fall in love with a random person.

BUT SERIOUSLY,

I liked this book until the men show up at the villa; I can appreciate how Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Arbuthnot have been changed by their time there, but the men just basically show up at the end of the book and suddenly (cue swelling music) IT’S AMORE. Everything is suddenly hunky-dory again between the estranged married couples, although Mr. Wilkins is still steeped in his miserly, ambulance-chasing mentality, and Mr. Arbuthnot originally came not to see his wife, but to make a grab, both personally and professionally, at Lady Caroline Dester the Flapper heiress. And Mrs. Fisher’s icy crotchetiness suddenly melts for, of all people, Mellersh Wilkins, a man who still primarily thinks of her as a walking cash cow for his solicitor firm. Briggs, the villa’s owner and perhaps the most sympathetic of the men, is incredibly fickle. Having come for Rose Arbuthnot, whom he thought to be a widow, he immediately transfers his affections to Lady Caroline once he laid eyes on her supernatural prettiness. And, despite protesting against the unwanted attention from men barely a dozen pages ago, including Briggs, the author tells us, conveniently, that it’s amore for them too.

I guess I just have difficulties with accepting the villa as a sort of deus ex machina for all the characters; or perhaps I was just having a bad day when I finished the book. Or perhaps I’m secretly a repressed housewife who desperately needs a life-restoring, love-enhancing holiday at an impossibly beautiful Italian villa on the Amalfi Coast. Yeah, that’s it. Now I’m going to pester hubby about blowing out our hard-earned nest egg on some charmingly dilapidated pile somewhere sunny in Italy.

Some spoilers ahead, so beware.

On a whim, I joined a few of my GR friends in a group read of this novel, which I'd not read previously. Originally published in 1922, the premise of the narrative is appealing: four unrelated women share a medieval castle on the Italian Riviera for a month, the "enchanted April" of the title. Each woman has a reason to escape her life in gloomy London and, in time, each woman is transformed by the experience.

The novel gets lots of love from reviewers and I understand why. It has warmth, wit and charm. It's also an ode to friendship, love and the transformative power of travel, sunshine and a beautiful environment. In addition, there's a fairytale element to the work - the use of the word "enchanted" in the title is a bit of giveaway.

As much I appreciate the strengths of the work, for me it fell away once the husbands of two of the characters arrived. I found both men's new appreciation for their wives difficult to believe. Fairytale endings are all very well, but the idea that badly damaged marriages are going to fix themselves quite so quickly stretches credulity just a bit too far. As did the behaviour of another male character, who turns up romantically interested in one of the women and transfers his interest to another within nanoseconds. Overall, while I like the female characters a lot, the men don't have much to be said for them. I'm not convinced that the enchantment would last after Italy, April and sunshine had disappeared. But then, I've never been much of a romatic.

Reading this has made me want to run away to Italy for a while. The idea of a month in a medieval castle with views of the Mediterranean is very appealing indeed, whether or not it works magic. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars for the fun of reading the book with others.

Per il mio personalissimo gusto questo libro è tollerabile solo perché è stato scritto nel 1922. Mi ha irritato dall'inizio alla sdolcinatissima fine, che mi è giunta ancora più intollerabile dopo che per un attimo avevo sperato (contro ogni speranza) che l'autrice avesse un colpo di coda e ci desse un bel sano divorzio invece di questo diabeticizzante finale in cui amore, amicizia e cuoricini e arcobaleni ci sommergono.
Lo salva, parzialmente, lo stile delizioso di scrittura, davvero bello, e la meravigliosa descrizione del giardino, ma per il resto le ha tutte: sentimentalismo zuccheroso, quattro protagoniste antipatiche (se mi diceva ancora una volta quanto fosse bella e adorabile Lady Caroline Dester mi mettevo a urlare), mariti e ammiratori che si dovrebbero badilare e invece si accolgono a braccia aperte, un bel po' di stereotipi di stampo inglese sugli italiani (siamo così pittoreschi!).
Oh, lo so di essere in minoranza, e giuro che i lati positivi li vedo, solo che a me mettono voglia solo di leggermi una di quelle cretinate in cui due manco si stringono la mano e già trombano come ricci. Quasi quasi stasera mi guardo Grey's Anathomy, che in quanto a trombare come ricci non scherzano nemmeno loro.

This book is absolutely delightful. Charming, funny -- a perfect combo of dry British humour with something close to farce in the tradition of  Three Men In A Boat -- and light without being silly or frivolous. Written in 1922, from the author's base in Portofino, Italy, in which it is set, the novel brings together four English women, previously unknown to each other, for a get-away-from-it-all vacation in a rented medieval castle (think of a 1920s airbnb).

What they are getting away from informs both their characters and their character arcs -- and lends the novel its gravitas. From lives variously dull, stagnant, unhappy, and grief-ridden, their transformation is brought about by the gorgeous setting, lovingly and beautifully described by von Arnim, and by, in fact, each other.

This is a perfect summer read, perhaps especially summer of 2017. It was escapist then, in post-WWI Europe, as it is now, but who is to quibble with a little escapism? I found this truly enchanting book's verdant nature, blossoming friendships, and reinvigorated love as restorative for me as they were for its characters.

(Audiobook, with excellent reading by Nadia May.)

I just loved this charming, funny and enchanting retro book about four women, basically strangers, who rent a small medieval castle on the coast of Italy for the month of April. Each from different circumstances have different agendas and very different attitudes about this "holiday". It is definitely going on my favorites list.

Another 5 star-er!

Like the four women who spend a month together in a flower-bedecked castle in Italy, the readers must surrender herself (or himself!) to the gentle, romantic and somewhat mystical charms of this book. It's a book about friendship, love and transformation; it is about journeys both external and internal, and the art of opening oneself to beauty and fresh possibilities. Von Arnim's style is breathy, and she is prone to the rhetorical device of repetition, but her sense of humour and occasionally sharp bits of characterisation and dialogue save the novel from being too fluffy. All in all, a charming novel - even if 'one' is stuck in the unseasonably cold England spring from which Mrs. Wilkins, Mrs. Arbuthnot, Lady Caroline and Mrs. Fisher have fled.

This 1922-novel seems to me to be the prose counterpart of what is called a ‘feel good movie’: light-hearted, fun, heart-warming. The setting indeed is enchanting: a castle estate on what is probably the Ligurian coast in Italy, moreover in the wonderful spring month of April. No wonder that von Arnim attributes a miraculous, healing effect to it, certainly for the four ladies on vacation, that have firm roots in drizzly England. The author has chosen her characters ingeniously: four women from different social classes and of different ages, each with their own character, and each with a loaded relationship to the male sex. The dynamic interaction between these four is the strength of this novel, in pointed dialogues that testify to more than average psychological insight and lots of very refined humor. The great weakness is that in the end it is men who bring the story to an end, an end that is far too sugary for my taste. But anyhow, this novel is really fun to read.

There's something about The Enchanted April that is so unlike any other book I've ever read. It's so happy, beautiful. filled with freshness and fragrance, that the restorative powers of the Italian castle seep out of the pages and can't help but brighten the mood of the reader too. In the copy I was reading it was stated that Von Arnim wanted to subvert certain expectations just by writing something happy - far more difficult as happiness is very unlikely to cause any drama, conflict or other scenarios which great storytelling tends to rely on. Somehow she manages it with ease.

I reread this book most years as a comfort read, and as I was meant to be heading to Italy at the moment, I thought I would take a book holiday instead. I'm always impressed by how much Von Arnim makes this book work in so many ways, seemingly against all odds. To be honest, Lotty (Mrs Wilkins) is the exact sort of person who would irritate the hell out of me in real life, and yet here she's sweet and endearing. Scrap, too, has few redeeming features and yet is somehow one of my favourite characters of all time. I also find the whole set up pretty dubious....but in this case I believe it. Even the vaguely sanctimonious Rose grew on me this time, and I found her a complete pleasure to revisit.

It's a gentle, sunshine-drenched read that leaves you feeling happy and content and doesn't require a lot of energy. There are some questionable moments (Scrap being called as decent as a man and finding this a huge compliment) but I can forgive these for the sheer joy this book brings.

The perfect book for spring and when you need a pick me up.

5 stars

Charming, beautiful and wonderfully witty! This was a complete hidden gem, but I loved it, loved the writing which was lyrical, loved the characters, who were all drawn to minuscule detail and mostly loved the exquisite descriptions of Italy and the flowering and fragrance of early April