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To
Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small medieval Italian
Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for
the month of April….Box 1000, The Times
Mrs.
Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins separately see the classified
advertisement in The Times on a miserably rainy February day in
London while at their club. They are both having marital
problems of a sort and caught up in their own particular
unhappinesses, but join forces. "Having got San
Salvatore - the beautiful, the religious name, fascinated them -
they in their turn would advertise in the Agony Column of The
Times, and they would inquire after two more ladies, of similar
desire to their own, to join them and share the expenses."
They find the two women they are looking for: Lady Caroline, a
young beauty, and Mrs. Fisher, older and still dreaming of
Victorian times. In a nutshell - four English women who are
strangers share a castle with a beautiful garden in the Italian
April and find the recipe for happiness.
In
1891, Elizabeth von Arnim married a Count (her first husband - she
later married Earl Russell), lived on his estate in Pomerania with
their five children, and even hired E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole
as tutors. Perhaps this garden in San Salvatore that von
Arnim describes with such luxuriant efflorescence gives the women
the pleasure she had in her own garden, the garden of Elizabeth
and her German Garden, the book which made her famous.
All
the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet.
The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly
stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely
different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath
her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from
which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting
through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the
mountains and the seas like a great black sword.
It
is a novel about the sun, about flowers and beauty, about
sensuality and joy, but all done with a deft hand, a light touch
that saves it from chocolate-box sentimentality. Von Arnim
was after all, a famous wit, and Walpole is said to have written
to a friend:
The Countess is a complete enigma. I don't see much of her but,
when I do, she has three moods (1) Charming, like her books only
more so (this does not appear often). (2) Ragging. Now she is
unmerciful - attacks you on every side, goes at you until you are
reduced to idiocy, and then drops you, limp. (3) Silence. This is
most terrible of all…
In
this novel all one sees is the first mood - it is, completely,
charming! And the perfect way to usher March out, and
welcome April!
Read:
The
Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim
The DVD of the
equally enchanting 1992 film will be released in the US
shortly.
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