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.

If you've ever imagined that if you could only _______________. (fill in the blank: get something, get away from somewhere or something, etc.) all your stress would dissolve, you are likely to read about yourself in this book. If you've ever struggled to dismantle your ego but found you cannot do it in a vacuum, and others will surely test the validity of any progress you make, you may squirm as I did. There was not one character of the four ladies who go away for a retreat (in a castle in Italy in the 1920s) in whom I did not find parts of myself. Yikes! If you are a meditator, you'll understand when I say this is "monkey-mind" struggles turned into a period garden comedy (the laughs don't come until the last third of the book). The monkey-mind tirades are bearable because they're couched in flower and fauna descriptions that are so sumptuous it makes the whole story into a tasty banquet, and the lead character, Mrs. Lotty Wilkins, is always there to model the reader's goal of ongoing enlightenment and joy.

Lesson: No matter where you go, there you are. And you've got to deal with it honestly if you honestly want to change. What a smart, evolved book and writer.

Just the best kind of novel. Layered, funny, astute, and just lovely through and through.

Очень правдивый роман о том, что многие проблемы в жизни моментально решатся, если просто взять и заставить себя уехать на месяц в итальянский замок.

My first Novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim and while it was an ok read I wont be adding any more of her novels to reading list. It's a charming and breezy and probably works if you like that kind of thing. I however was hoping for more a Daphne du Maurier feel to it and therefore this book just didn't work for me.

The novel tells the story of four dissimilar English Ladies who go on holiday to Italy after seeing an advertisement for a small medieval castle on the beautiful Italian Rivera.
I love novels set in in Italy and having visited Portofino I could not resist this classic and bought it on a whim.

I have to be honest from the very first chapter I realized this wasn't my type of novel and I just couldn't connect or make an effort with the characters. I loved the setting and magic of Portofino but the novel was slow and a little too sweet for me.

An ok read but not one for my favorites shelf.

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.

Loved, loved, loved it.

This was a perfect peaceful book. There were no major issues nor were we trying to solve the problems of the planet. This was just a book where the important message was to be selfish, to allow yourself to get back to the things that are always the most important, that of your love for each other. Yes, it does sound oh so maudlin, but this sweet, kind book is just what I needed. It made me say ah at the end (and really mean it!)

Our story follows four woman thrown together in the rental of a property in Italy. Their lives are all awry and going in various directions that was not good for them nor their psyches. So, this house is rented first by one and then the next until a compliment of four ladies, who did not know each other from a hole in the wall, move in together to spend their quiet alone time. They, particularly two of them, do not want to be disturbed but the charm of the house and that of the other two ladies breaks down their barriers and they become loving people willing to take on all that that word connotes. Enter this home in Italy and life, and of course things Italian like food and flowers and oh yes, the wine, start to change the attitudes and the love life of these women (well really the love life of only three of them!) It makes the ladies realize that their lives need that four letter word and how they do find it is the glory of the novel. All of them change in the way in which they view themselves and perhaps more importantly in the way they view others.

It is a simple yet elegant story that was gentle as a Spring breeze on an April day.

Introduction, by Brenda Bowen

--The Enchanted April

Chapter One of 'Enchanted August', by Brenda Bowen

Shall I tell you a secret? .. It's always been my fantasy to share a castle with my friends!

This book was a joy to read! It satisfies so many of my literary cravings: kinship, validation, botanical beauty. There's a shy misfit, a beautiful socialite. All four voices, though quite distinct, resonated with me in some way. Elizabeth von Arnim was very smart in the way she developed characters and intertwined their separate narratives into one cohesive whole. I was just enough aware of literary device to be impressed by it, though nothing ever felt forced. It felt as effortless as a fresh, April breeze. I was made giddy by the deceptive simplicity of it all.

I'm a little conflicted as to how I should shelve this book. My "ink in full flower" shelf refers to floral imagery (seen here in abundance) but also to poetic prose. Her prose, for me, is a little too sparse. Poetic, in its way, but not quite vivid enough. It's my only criticism, as I very much appreciated this novel. There's something so inclusive about it, --perhaps because it's a happy story about sad people, perhaps because she defended her characters while allowing for growth and transformation. There's a warmth and a sweetness, an innate hopefulness. I definitely recommend it.

The environment is dreary… Living from day to day is a dull routine… But one drab day an eye meets a very promising advertisement in the newspaper…

She was reading about the mediaeval castle and the wistaria, or rather had read about it ten minutes before, and since then had been lost in dreams, – of light, of colour, of fragrance, of the soft lapping of the sea among little hot rocks…

It all looks unbelievably fantastic… But knock and the door will be opened… At last all the seemingly insurmoutable obstacles are surmounted and she’s in the castle…

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.

So now there are four visiting women in the castle: a blithe optimist, a pessimistic do-gooder, an old arrogant snob and a young tired of society socialite craving for solitude…

The idea of Mrs. Fisher bursting out into anything, she who seemed so particularly firmly fixed inside her buttons, made Mrs. Arbuthnot laugh. She condoned Lotty’s loose way of talking of heaven, because in such a place, on such a morning, condonation was in the very air. Besides, what an excuse there was.
And Lady Caroline, sitting where they had left her before breakfast on the wall, peeped over when she heard laughter, and saw them standing on the path below, and thought what a mercy it was they were laughing down there and had not come up and done it round her.

But the atmosphere of the castle and the genius loci were doing their work so the guests couldn’t feel anything but affability… Their attitude to reality and to each other starts altering…

…they too felt a working going on inside themselves: they felt more cleared, both of them, that second week…

To see our life in a new light we need changes.

Such a sweet story, almost cloying at times, yet so charming and amusing that it takes the edge off the mush.  I read this because I love the movie.  My taste in movies is vastly different from my reading preferences.  There is one difference in the movie from the book that I deem as well nigh brilliant.  Read this for the excellent characters and the lush prose.  You can almost see and smell the panoply of flowers, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, and breathe in the fresh April air of Portofino, Italy.  You may just be transformed.

This novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, first published in 1922, opens on a rain-swept London day in February not very long after the end of WWI. Lotty Wilkins is in town from her home in Hampstead for a day of shopping. Going to her club for lunch, she happens to see an advertisement in a paper addressed to " ... Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine". It seems that a small mediaeval Italian castle on the shores of the Mediterranean is being offered for rent during the month of April. When Lotty spies a woman of the "church set" known to her by sight -- a Mrs Arbuthnot -- apparently perusing the same advertisement, she impulsively engages the reserved Mrs Arbuthnot in conversation.

Both these women are in a state of discontent as far as their individual matrimonial positions are concerned. Rose Arbuthnot has gradually drifted away from her husband Frederick as she does not approve of his profession, that of a successful writer of "popular memoirs of the mistresses of kings". Rose has always had serious problems with the way in which Mr Arbuthnot makes his money, and she is riddled with guilt over the fact that her charitable work with the poor of the parish is partly financed with funds originating from this frivolous and sinful source. Her disapproval has succeeded in driving a wedge between them, with an austere and loveless relationship the inevitable result -- with Rose dedicating herself to her good works, and Frederick indifferent and dismissive of his wife's feelings and opinions. Lotty, married to Mellersh Wilkins, is in awe of him and overpowered by his aura of superiority as a distinguished solicitor.

Lotty, at best a rather impetuous creature, is quick to mention the possibility of the two of them taking the advertised castle for the month of April, and so the germ of an idea -- impossible for sure and fraught with difficulties in bringing it to execution -- is born.

Once the plan is set in motion, it gains momentum complete with little subterfuges -- to circumvent Mr Wilkins' possible objection; Mr Arbuthnot's usual indifference to Rose's doings is not a factor to be considered -- and painstaking planning as to the arrangement of finances. On learning from Thomas Briggs, the young owner of the castle, that the property has enough beds for eight people, they decide to advertise in their turn with the purpose of adding more people to the party and thus reducing the costs involved. And so the other two major characters are introduced: the youthful aristocrat Lady Caroline Dester (known as Scrap) and the elderly widowed curmudgeon Mrs Fisher. Both these women have their own reasons for wishing to spend a month away from London -- especially Scrap, who has grown weary of the unwanted company of gentlemen "grabbers" constantly vying for her attention.

The midnight arrival of Lotty and Rose at the castle of San Salvatore in a downpour fragrant with the enticing aromas of wet earth and blossoms and accompanied by an umbrella-wielding servant lighting their way with a lantern, is rendered unforgettably by Von Arnim in beautiful prose. And once San Salvatore is reached, the reader is transported to a magical place of flowers, breath-taking views and balmy sun-drenched days.

As the delights of the castle start working its charms on the four ladies, the stage is set for changing attitudes and new insights. When Lotty decides to invite her husband to join her -- trusting implicitly in the powerful restorative qualities of San Salvatore to transform their barren relationship -- another layer is added to the story. Soon Rose starts deliberating on the advisability of extending a similar invitation to Frederick, and so the delicate dance is set in motion that will determine the outcome for all these meticulously drawn characters. But it's not only romance and flowers. Elizabeth von Arnim displays a delicious sense of humor throughout, like in the subtle competition between Rose and Mrs Fisher for the right to preside as hostess, or in the sly appropriation of certain areas of the castle for their exclusive use by Scrap and Mrs Fisher -- and the supremely funny passages dealing with the temperamental bathroom at the castle; and Mellersh Wilkins' undignified experience while enjoying a bath there after his early morning arrival at San Salvatore.

I really took my time with this one, not because it was a trial to get through it, but because the spell it weaves is so utterly compelling and all-encompassing that you want to linger in its atmosphere for the longest possible time. It made me yearn for a place like San Salvatore (in the same way millions of readers must have yearned for Shangri-La on first becoming acquainted with James Hilton's Lost Horizon), where all the niggling disappointments of life and the general shortage of love and compassion of our modern age can simply melt away and leave you a changed person in all respects.

For a novel first published ninety-five years ago, it still has the power to delight and entrance at every turn. It certainly held me in a velvet vice. I do not think many people could stand up to the charms of Von Arnim's book without giving in willingly to its very real pleasures.