Impact: The Enchanted April

The Woman Behind the Wisteria

Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Australia in 1866, a cousin of Katherine Mansfield, and she spent much of her life escaping. Her first escape was into writing: her debut novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898, described a woman retreating from a domineering husband into the solace of her garden. It was a massive hit. She became known simply as "Elizabeth" — the author — and kept the pseudonym for the rest of her career.

Her first husband was a Prussian count. Her second was Frank Russell, the older brother of Bertrand Russell, who was so difficult to live with that Bertrand Russell himself reportedly warned her against the marriage. She did not listen, married Frank anyway, and eventually fled that marriage too — to the Swiss Alps, to London, to the French Riviera. She knew, from long personal experience, exactly what it felt like to be a woman whose life had been organized almost entirely around the convenience and appetites of a man. The Enchanted April was not written from the outside.

Four Women, One Advertisement

The novel opens with one of the great meet-cutes in English fiction — not a romance between two people, but a conspiracy between two strangers. Mrs. Wilkins, timid and overlooked, spots a classified ad in The Times: a small medieval Italian castle on the shores of the Mediterranean, to let for April. She has ninety pounds saved. She also has a husband — Mellersh, a solicitor — who is difficult about fish, particular about soles, and not the sort of man who takes his wife to Italy. She notices Mrs. Arbuthnot, a woman she knows only by sight, reading the same page of the same newspaper. They have never spoken. They share the castle.

This is the engine of the whole novel: not plot, exactly, but orchestration. Von Arnim assembles four women who would never have chosen each other — the mousy Mrs. Wilkins, the quietly grief-stricken Mrs. Arbuthnot, the magnificently glacial Lady Caroline Dester (young, beautiful, exhausted by being adored), and the formidable elderly Mrs. Fisher, who lives entirely in the past and guards the tea urn like a throne. Put them all in a castello above Portofino and see what April does to them.

An Immediate Sensation

Unlike many books now considered classics, The Enchanted April did not have to wait for posterity. It was a bestseller from the start, praised in Britain and America alike, and von Arnim — already famous from her earlier books — found that this one struck a particular nerve with readers who were, in 1922, still living in the long shadow of the First World War. The English reading public had spent four years in catastrophe and several more years in its aftermath. The idea of April in Italy, of wisteria and warmth, was not merely pleasant. It was almost desperately attractive.

The novel was adapted for the stage within a year of publication, and enjoyed a successful run in London. Von Arnim was not a literary outsider struggling for recognition — she moved in circles that included H.G. Wells (with whom she had a long affair), E.M. Forster, and other significant figures of the period. But The Enchanted April reached far beyond literary London. It was the kind of book that people pressed into each other's hands.

What the Book Is Really About

The novel is often described as a story about transformation and beauty, which is true but undersells it. What von Arnim is examining, with a very sharp and occasionally merciless eye, is the specific damage that English social life in the early twentieth century inflicted on women — not through dramatic cruelty, but through the slow accumulation of smallness. Mrs. Wilkins's clothes are a "perfect sight" because her husband encouraged her to save money. Mrs. Arbuthnot has poured herself so entirely into charitable work that she has almost ceased to exist as a person. Lady Caroline is so relentlessly pursued by admiring men that she has become a kind of beautiful prisoner. Mrs. Fisher has barricaded herself inside the Victorian past.

What Italy does — what April does — is not magic, exactly. It is the simple effect of removing these women from the structures that diminish them and giving them space to notice what they actually feel. Von Arnim is careful not to be sentimental about this. The transformation is real but it is also fragile, funny, and sometimes undignified. Mrs. Wilkins does not become a new woman. She becomes more fully herself — and von Arnim implies, quietly but firmly, that this is a radical act. The men who eventually arrive at the castello are changed by their wives' happiness, not the other way around. That reversal is the novel's central argument.

The Comedy People Miss

Because The Enchanted April has a warm reputation and a pastel-colored film adaptation, readers sometimes approach it expecting something soft. They find, instead, a writer with a very dry, very precise comic intelligence. Von Arnim's portrait of Mrs. Fisher — who has personally known Tennyson, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, and who mentions this at every available opportunity — is a minor masterpiece of gentle devastation. Her hostility to the other women, her proprietary attitude toward the castle's best chair, her gradual and mortifying thaw over the course of the month: all of it is observed with the kind of affectionate cruelty that only a writer who actually likes people can manage.

There is also something quietly absurdist about Mellersh Wilkins — a man so thoroughly a certain type that he has almost become a symbol of that type. He encourages his wife to save money, eats only soles, and refers to his own potential enjoyment of her nest-egg in the same breath as advising her to accumulate it. Von Arnim does not need to editorialize. She just lets him speak.

A Lasting Cultural Footprint

The 1992 film adaptation, directed by Mike Newell and starring Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Polly Walker, and Joan Plowright, introduced The Enchanted April to a new generation of readers and won three Academy Award nominations. It is a genuinely good adaptation — faithful in spirit if not always in detail — and it set off a wave of renewed interest in von Arnim's work more broadly. The castle used in filming, the Castello Brown above Portofino, became a tourist destination on the strength of the film alone.

The novel's influence runs through a specific vein of later fiction: stories about women who travel, who escape, who find themselves in foreign places and discover that the foreign place has changed them. It is an ancestor of books like Under the Tuscan Sun and a long tradition of Anglophone women's travel writing and fiction that uses Italy or France or the Mediterranean as a space for reinvention. The difference is that von Arnim is funnier and less earnest than most of her descendants, and considerably more skeptical about whether reinvention, once you return to London, actually sticks.

Why It Still Matters

The book's central premise — that women are quietly suffocated by the administrative and emotional demands placed on them, and that beauty and rest are not luxuries but necessities — has not aged at all. The specific textures of Edwardian and post-war English social life have changed, but the structure of the argument is entirely legible to a contemporary reader. So is the comedy. So is the ache beneath the comedy.

Von Arnim is also simply a pleasure to read — precise, ironic, and never falsely consoling. The Enchanted April does not promise that everything will be wonderful. It promises that April in Italy is real, that wisteria exists, that Mrs. Wilkins's ninety pounds are well spent, and that there are worse things in the world than being, briefly, somewhere beautiful. In 1922, after everything, that was enough. It still is.

Further Reading & Resources

Related Works in Our Library