![]() The book, Elizabeth and her German Garden was an unexpected runaway success to the extent that all her subsequent books had the author-line ‘by Elizabeth of the German Garden’. ![]() ‘Elizabeth’ was initially a fiction, but eventually she signed her letters with that name - even to her family. With her husband’s encouragement Mary left Berlin for their country estate, where she began to create a garden and a book, as well as another persona for herself. She married him without realising what her life as a member of the ‘Junker’ nobility in Germany would entail, and the level of rigid formality did not suit her temperament. It was here that she met the German Graf (Count) Henning von Arnim who made love to her on top of the Duomo in Florence. ![]() She studied at the Royal College of Music and, on a visit to Italy, played for Liszt’s daughter Cosima Wagner. Like Katherine Mansfield, Mary Beauchamp was a musical prodigy, she played the piano and the organ to high professional standards. ![]() ‘Elizabeth’ was born in Australia to an English father and an Australian mother, christened Mary Beachamp, and brought to England at the age of three, but her father had a habit of wandering around Europe, so she saw quite a bit of Italy, France and Switzerland during her childhood. Both were writers, both lived in permanent exile, and both struggled with questions of identity and belonging. ![]() I was struck, reading this biography, by the number of parallels between ‘Elizabeth’ von Arnim and her cousin Katherine Mansfield. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |