Escape from the mundane

Von Arnim’s writing is the sort that restores hope, heals hearts and acknowledges pain without dwelling on it.

The end of a difficult year demands escape — which is hard to do considering that most of the country seems to be escaping to the same places. Instagram, that handy tool to spy on other people’s vacations, confirms this — everyone and their cousin is on a beach in Goa or, if they can afford the slightly higher airfare, in the Maldives.

Elizabeth Von Arnim wrote about escaping the mundane rather well. Her most popular novel was The Enchanted April — a story about four women who leave their dreary and stressful lives in London for a month on the Italian Riviera.

This plot might seem hopelessly romantic — and it is. Von Arnim’s output was famously dismissed by Rebecca West (the two actually were, at different times, H G Wells’ mistresses) as having “a fatal tendency to humbug”. A description that is grossly unfair and always applied to literature that doesn’t heave with Meaning and Big Ideas. But, life needs romance, silliness and lightness in it — and this book acts as the best tonic for those who need an armchair escape in a pandemic.

Von Arnim, who was born in Australia in 1866 before moving to England as a three-year-old, wrote The Enchanted April in the aftermath of the collapse of her second marriage. It begins
with Mrs Wilkins, a Hampstead housewife, coming across an ad in The Times just below the Agony column. It disturbs and excites her. It is addressed to “To Those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine” and offers a small medieval Italian castle for rent for a month. You can’t blame her for getting restless — who wouldn’t want to spend a month in Portofino in a castle with wisteria?

But Mrs Wilkins has a problem we can all sympathise with — she doesn’t have enough money to rent the castle by herself. Her penny-pinching husband doesn’t allow her anything more than a 90 pound dress allowance each year and her father contributes another 100. She isn’t flush with the cash needed to rent an Italian castle, no matter how small it is. So, she has to find like-minded strangers who’d want to spend time by the sea. Soon enough, through sheer doggedness, Mrs Wilkins has gathered herself a coterie of women willing to split the rent and expenses — the do-gooder Mrs Arbuthnot, the rather dominating widow Mrs Fisher and the gorgeous Lady Caroline Dester. Each one is trying to leave behind the misery of London in the early 1920s and hoping to find something transformative in Italy.

One of the great pleasures of The Enchanted April is its ravishing description of nature, the fruits and flowers of the Italian landscape. As spring progresses to summer and the women’s spirits stir and renew, Von Arnim’s writing (most definitely not humbug) awakens the reader’s pleasure too. Hope is restored, hearts heal. Pain is not forgotten — but acknowledging it allows the story and its characters to move forward. In the process they, and the reader, rediscover joy.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.