Its most interesting to see that a Solitary Summer in Elizabeth's World didn't mean going to live in splendid isolation in a wood somewhere.. it just meant not having any house guests but spending time with a husband, children, servants and neighbours. I wouldn't call that very solitary myself. However it is a wonderful book with beautiful descriptions of nature and gardens and reading.. and witty descriptions of neighbours and particularly the children. There is a rather dark side to it, with some people living very difficult lives.. I think her descriptions of the lives of the poor are far less sanitized than they usually are.. I would love to have known Elizabeth, she is a delight. I particularly loved it when she said how few of her friends really thought like her .. and that she grew distant from her closest friend because of an argument about being a goose girl. Oh Elizabeth! I would have agreed with you on the goose girl!

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Elizabeth and Her German Garden 4 stars
The Enchanted April 2 stars

Un romanzo delizioso, arguto, divertente, critico ma con il garbo e l'eleganza che caratterizzano sempre von Arnim...

After reading this book I feel that I would have loved to have known Elizabeth von Arnim, she seems such a kindred soul! She decides to have a summer free of guests to her house. Her husband, the 'Man of Wrath' (her term of endearment, rather than a description of his personality!), hints that she will quickly become bored and crave more human society, but as you read the book it is clear that she revels in it. Elizabeth has a deep love for her garden and the surrounding natural world, which is clearly evident in her detailed descriptions of these. So whether she is simply enjoying her flowers, taking a moonlight carriage ride under the auspice of her eldery driver or walking in the woods she is very content with her own company or that of her family. I would happily spend a summer such as hers.

This a light, airy book which is an absolute delight to read. A good cure for a case of the doldrums,

Not a real novel – in the whole book nothings ever happens. But as usual with this writer, this is a real comfort book

"Shall you take a book with you?" he asked.
"Yes, I shall," I replied, slightly nettled by his tone. "I am quite ready to admit that though the fields and flowers are always ready to teach, I am not always in the mood to learn, and sometimes my eyes are incapable of seeing things that at other times are quite plain."

the less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and that no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity.
I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more—all the books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases round the walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, and easiest to get at, are those I love the best—the very elect among my favourites. They change from time to time as I get older…
What a medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austen leaning against Heine—what would she have said to that, I wonder?—with Miss Mitford and Cranford to keep her in countenance on her other side. Here is my Goethe…
I believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the stoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simple expedient of turning your face to the fire; but when you have no fire,
I hope he will be more successful than I was in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, at which stage their questions became so searching as to completely confound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especially regrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought the course to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiar to infallibility in a corner, and telling them that they were too young to understand these things for the present
"I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. At least, I saw you, but it is so dark I thought you were a cushion."
Now no woman likes to be taken for a cushion, so I rose and began to make tea with an icy dignity of demeanour.

while every hamlet has its burying-ground, three or four hamlets have to share a church; and indeed the need for churches is not so urgent as that for graves, seeing that, though we may not all go to church, we all of us die and must be buried
They [her children] live in a whole world of independent ideas in regard to heaven and the angels, ideas quite distinct from other people's, and, as far as I can make out, believe that the Being they call lieber Gott pervades the garden, and is identical with, among other things, the sunshine and the air on a fine day.
The idea of the June baby striding across the firmament and hurling the stars about as carelessly as though they were tennis-balls was so magnificent that it sent shivers of awe through me as I read.

There is no nuisance more intolerable than having somebody's rhapsodies thrust upon you when you have no enthusiasm of your own that at all corresponds. […]sometimes even now, after years of study in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not in the least understood.

A lovely read for the dead of winter!

Another book with barely any plot, it is about a woman who wants to spend a whole summer enjoying her garden by herself, (apart from her children, April baby, May Baby and June Baby). What a luxury, just books and a garden. She does have a lovely turn of phrase, making this a book to savour.

It's been a while since I read this, but as I recall she doesn't get much solitude as it keeps being interrupted. I love the protagonist, and all of the books "about" her. I own two copies of this book.

A pleasant follow up to ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. I think I may have enjoyed it more.

This is a memoir of the summer Elizabeth refuses to have any houseguests at their country estate. She wants to revel in bucolic solitude, but of course she still has to interact with servants, gardeners, her “Babies”, the French governess, the local serfs, dull clergy, and the Prussian officers who are quartered with them for weeks (ok I finally understand how this sort of thing actually started revolutions in the past). And of course her grumpy aristocratic husband, who is less awful in this book.

The bits where she turns her razor-sharp wit on people of different social standing to herself…so uncomfortable to read!

There are so many lovely passages in this book! This is a sequel to "Elizabeth and Her German Garden," which is also a favorite of mine.

"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."

"How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floating leisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hot scramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at the vulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring and unabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are only pennies, after all -- unpleasant, battered copper things, without a gold piece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and the hatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of those above you who have more."

"I wish I were not so easily affected by each other's looks. Sometimes, during the course of a long correspondence with a friend, he grows to be inexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine his intellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in great perfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity, after which I have been so long and so vainly striving."

"If one believed in angels one would feel that they love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent, and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave, judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless, and forgiven."

My curiosity is satisfied. I surmise that van Arnim's novels do not rise to the excellence of her Enchanted April. Too bad. Solitary Summer is such a promising title for a summer read.

annual summer read…that’s my plight as A Woman