Fiction · 1922
The Enchanted April
A small ad in a London newspaper — "To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine" — a medieval castle in Italy, available for the month of April. Two women who don't know each other, both tired of husbands and rain and being the sort of person other people find useful, answer it on the same afternoon and decide, mostly out of desperation, to go halves. They need two more women to make the rent work. They get a beautiful, difficult stranger and an elderly widow neither of them particularly wants.
Elizabeth von Arnim published The Enchanted April in 1922, and its plot is almost embarrassingly simple — four Englishwomen rent an Italian castle for a month — which is exactly why it still works. Nothing large happens. Wisteria happens, and sunshine, and the slow, specific thawing of four people who arrived unable to stand each other and didn't expect to leave any different. Von Arnim had already made her name writing about gardens as a kind of argument; here the garden does the arguing for her.
Bibliomancer publishes the complete text, exactly as von Arnim wrote it.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1866–1941 · Modern
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Kirribilli, Australia, and raised mainly in England before marrying a Prussian count and moving to his estate in Pomerania — the setting for her first, anonymously published novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), a wry, semi-autobiographical account of a young Englishwoman's life and garden there that became an immediate bestseller and gave her the pen name, "Elizabeth," she used for the rest of her career. She went on to write more than twenty novels, including the later The Enchanted April (1922), and was a cousin of Katherine Mansfield and, for a time, the companion of Bertrand Russell's brother. She died in the United States at seventy-four.
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