Elizabeth Von Arnim

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.