Utterly delightful, and I wanted to be in her garden with a book, and tea, and peace and quiet.

I am so glad I found this writer.
The book is charming, I ordered German Garden for myself - one has to have an E von Arnim on one's book shelf.

I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests.

The nameless narrator, an autobiographical version of von Arnim herself, who married a Prussian count and lived with him and their children on his estate in Pomerania, proposes this to her husband, the Man of Wrath, at the outset of this charming, short novel. He predicts she'll be bored, but agrees that they won't invite guests for the duration of the summer.

She's confident she'll revel in the solitude, which is, in any case, relative. She sees her husband, their children, referred to as the April, May, and June Babies, their tutor, a governess, a gardener, the women of the village she's expected to look in on, a candidate for pastor her husband must interview, and a horde of soldiers and officers they're obligated to quarter in September.

She does revel in the solitude and observes and describes exquisitely the glories of her garden at all times of day and night during her enchanted summer. Stories of time she spends with her Babies are endearing, especially when their innocent questions overwhelm her theological expertise. Yet her accounts of servants and village households sometimes reveal that not everyone's lives are as charmed as her own or her family's.

I highly recommend for anyone interested in a soothing escape to a quiet summer garden in the country.

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.

" I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time grow." -Elizabeth

Isn't that rather a nice way to begin a book about Elizabeth's attempt at a solitary summer? She asks her spouse about the possibility of spending the summer alone... in her garden with her books with no intrusions from the outside world. He stamps his cigar and wonders whether she might find it dull. And then the reader embarks on the musings of Elizabeth during her solitary summer; that isn't so solitary as it turns out.

I found the descriptions of her garden layout and its inhabitants lovely, especially while reading it on a cold grey January afternoon. Nature truly nurtures Elizabeth's soul and she readily shares her delights in it. Her garden and library are her joys in life. In that, I've found a kindred spirit in Elizabeth.

When sharing her thoughts on life, her garden, interactions with villagers, and the military personnel billeted briefly in her home; the reader is treated to a combination of cynicism, humor, self deprecation, and at times the atrocious disconnect a woman of her class has with the rest of world. Even when she's in her most atrocious mood, I rather found her to be like that friend we all have that we laugh at their awful comment and say "Don't say that to anyone else. That's awful to say that!" And yet, Elizabeth always found a way to endear herself to me.

I truly am enjoying Elizabeth von Arnim's books and am looking forward to the next one.

Resoconto di un'estate trascorsa espressamente senza il disturbo di ospiti esterni, godendosi il giardino così faticosamente sistemato e la vita in campagna. Alla fine dei conti è un nì. Splendide le pagine in cui il giardino viene metaforicamente traslato a svelare la bellezza della vita, splendide le descrizioni sensoriali del contesto, presente, ma non eccessivamente insistita, la critica alla società patriarcale dell'epoca e all'ignoranza imperante nelle classi povere, ma altre parti sono davvero noiose, prolisse senza motivo, solite indugiare in particolari abbastanza neutri ai fini della trama.

I first discovered Elizabeth Von Arnim through Elizabeth and her German Garden and instantly fell in love. I next read An Enchanted April and assumed all her books were delicately balanced works of joy and snark. Then I read Vera and realised she has a dark side and, as much as I have loved many of her other works, they hadn’t captured the joy of that first one. So I was very eager to read The Solitary Summer when I picked it up, it being a direct sequel to German Garden.

Similar to the first book, it presents the character of ‘Elizabeth’, her husband ‘the Man of Wrath’ and her three children, the ‘babies’ named after different months. It starts with a wager between Elizabeth and her husband, that she can spend an entire summer in her garden with her flowers and books without being bored. She says it will be easy, “I want to be idle as I can so my soul has time to grow”. I work in a school and get a month and change off for a summer holiday, and her plan is very much mine in the summer.

Of course, she’s not always alone. There are the ‘babies’, although they are clearly older and some of the chapters where she and they are discussing topics are very funny - especially the hodge-podge of English and German the children adopt. I thought her description of ‘the giant’ that comes in to teach the children was good, he’s obviously a good teacher. Later tutors for those children included EM Forster, and Hugh Walpole.

Of course there are lots of discussions and descriptions of plants and flowers. I am a city-dweller with no knowledge of these things but Von Arnim manages to make these interesting and evocative. She’s able to transmit the pleasure she feels, and that’s good enough. The piece in the June chapter, about waking up early and going for a walk in the country is blissful.

She also talks more about books and her relationship with them in this. Most of what she feels about books can be recognised by a book-lover, what a deep source of pleasure they are. I like how she organises them, the bookcases and shelves having the decent ones (the bad ones banished to another room) but the best ones around a pillar. These books are ones that evoke similar feelings that the Von Arnim ones do to me, works like Cranford and old Children’s favourites - books that ‘spark joy’.

I also like her notion that books like to be read in different places. She has her special Goethe bench. Poets for outside, Johnson and Boswell for in a library on a rainy day. Although she describes Johnson as ‘the apostle of common sense’, she says she feels more like Bozzy - I don’t think she would if his diaries had been available when she was alive.

Elizabeth faces a lot of casual misogyny in her life. Much of it from ‘the Man of Wrath’, who she dedicates the book to and seems to have a decent relationship with, but he often spouts off about ‘women’. She seems to internalise this and seems to look down on many women. The chapter about how the poor live is also incredibly condescending and a bit of a blotch on the book.

Not quite reaching the heights of Elizabeth and her German Garden, it was probably a good thing that Von Arnim started delving more into proper stories, even as those stories still borrowed from her life. I would happily read The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen if I picked it up though, and really, really want to read her autobiography, All the Dogs I have Known - for the title alone.

I previously read Elizabeth and Her German Garden; this is essentially a continuation of what started there. While her social privilege bothered me in that book, in this one it is far less noticeable and I was able to simply enjoy the book for what it was. She is, I think, like her garden, a bit more mature here. There are some lovely lines and some pleasant mild humor. Gardeners, obviously, will particularly enjoy these books, but, as a non-gardener, I still found them worth the reading. I like this one better, but, then, I'm an introvert and the idea of her "solitary" summer is particularly appealing to me! :)

Sometimes, you have trouble rating a book. Is the recollection of a rich aristocratic woman of a summer spent in her garden with her books worth 5 stars ? There is no riveting plot, nothing really happens and her life sometimes feels unreal.

However, Elizabeth von Arnim knows how to share her deep abiding love for her garden, for her books, those she loves to read again and again and those that won't remain on her shelves for long. She writes delightfully about soldiers billeted in her home (= invading her privacy) and how she has to entertain them, the gardeners who happen on her when she wants to remain alone and quiet, the strange customs of the villagers, but mostly, she writes of how impossible it is for her to spend one day without her garden, in all seasons. The plants she chose, the struggle it was to make them grow, the fails, the wild flowers, wild gardens, the scents, the colours, and mostly the peace and happiness she finds there, the beauty she enjoys.

She was a woman who didn't have much to do during the day but play a little with her children, dine with her family, entertain accointances, read, write, enjoy her gardens, so her life doesn't have much in common with mine. Yet I love the way she writes : she communicates her passions effortlessly, like she's not even trying, with tongue in cheek humour, just like Ella Fitzgerald sang so wonderfully with apparently so little effort on her behalf. She was kind and took pleasure in little things, she enjoyed quiet and beauty. Re-reading this in winter, while it is cold and damp and there is hardly any flower in sight is like a balm on my spirit, it suffused me with a warmth that put a smile on my face during all these pages *happy sigh*...

"He was a good man, for he loved his garden" - that is the epitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a far clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of sonorous Latinities. How could he be anything but good since he loved a garden - that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us, and leaves us, each time we hav been in it, clearer, and purer, and more harmless ?"

On German novels and the German love of food :
"Any story-book or novel you take up is full of feeling descriptions of what everybody ate and drank, and there are a great many more meals than kisses ; so that the novel-reader who expects a love-tale finds with disgust that he is put off with menus."

This is a sequel to "Elizabeth and her German garden."I enjoyed meeting the Man of Wrath and the April, May and June babies again. Reading this was as relaxing as spending time alone in a beautiful garden.

I began this book in October 2015, however had to set aside by page 34 due to problems with my eyes. I coincidentally picked almost exactly a year later, when I was able to read again. During my first go, I noted, "Very wise - many quotes could be pulled from the pages," and then followed this with two:

pg. 4: "They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how can you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great deal into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if you try for ever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has not got it in him to be happy. The only result probably would be that you knock your own out of yourself. Obviously happiness must come from within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me more than sufficient to fill five quiet months."

pg. 32: "I know what I would do if I were both poor and genteel -- the gentility should go to the place of all good iliities, including utility, respectability, and imbecility, and I would sit, quite frankly poor, with a piece of bread, and a pot of geraniums, and a book. I conclude that if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary to decency I might be able to afford a geranium, because I see them so often in the windows of cottages where there is little else; and if I preferred such inexpensive indulgences as thinking and reading and wandering in the fields to the doubtful gratification arising from kept-up appearances (always for the bedazzlement of the people opposite, and therefore always vulgar), I believe I should have enough left over to buy a radish to eat with my bread; and if the weather were fine, and I could eat it under a tree, and give a robin some crumbs in return for his cheeriness, would there be another creature in the world so happy? I know there would not.

Shortly after this I stopped and, as I mention above, resumed October 14, 2016. It's a short book and I devoured the rest. My thought coming away was, for the first time in my 47 year (other than one of the Alcott girls), "if I could be anyone from the past, I think I should like to have been Elizabeth von Arnim."

In her own words: (pg.73) "Keep quiet and say one's prayers -- certainly not merely the best, but the only things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a form of thanksgiving."

She was not a Buddhist, but she and her husband we voracious readers and she has a wide philosophy. This little book will stay near me.

A new book best friend! I am a huge Elizabeth von Arnim fan, but this book is now my favorite. I don't know what it was about it specifically except that reading this book felt like home to me. The way EVA writes truly speaks to me. This summer memoir(ish) story was the ultimate in coziness for me with her flower garden descriptions, the way she describes her 'babies', her everyday activities and her encounters with the 'Man of Wrath'.

Even though it seems like a strictly light-hearted book, it's actually very deep. I added so many book darts on the passages that I wanted to remember. Can't wait to read this book again. It's definitely now my favorite EVA, even more than The Enchanted April. Looking forward to reading the last book in this trilogy very soon.

Highly recommended!

120 Jahre alt ist dieser kleine Roman. Selbstbewusst, klug und humorig reflektiert die Autorin sich und ihre Umwelt. Trotz aller Leichtigkeit sollte das Bändchen langsam und aufmerksam gelesen werden, in dem viele Bonmots zu entdecken sind.