The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook.

Never did I look forward so intensely to anything, and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little things have achieved in the twenty four hours in the way of new leaf or increase of lovely red shoot. It includes commentary on nature and bourgeois German society, but is primarily humorous due to Elizabeth's frequent mistakes and her idiosyncratic outlook on life. Very pompous and men-know-everything and women should be seen at times but rarely ever heard because nothing of sense comes out of their mouths (that is the attitude of the Man of Wrath). Without letting the situation she found herself in depresses her, she finds a way to make the best out of it. On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed for some one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me.In fact, from reading the novel I would have thought her an aristocratic German raised, as many were, by English and French governesses. Then follows a winter episode where Elizabeth has to entertain two guests, a close friend and a woman foisted upon her. Where Virginia Woolf said that women need a room of their own, von Arnim makes a strong case for a garden as that most necessary of settings. This is a woman who came to be known under several names, but Elizabeth von Arnim became her most used pen name and by which she is known to family and friends. She plays with her beloved daughters, even as she grieves the house and garden in which she grew up and which she lost to her cousins for the "crime" of having been born a girl.

This little gem of a book, the first novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim I had read, both delighted and intrigued me. Her husband, one of the Prussian nobility and a very wealthy man, paid for slave labor from Poland and Russia to work for him. This biography offers the modern reader a fresh perspective on the life and work of this author who despite personal difficulties and tragedy, became one of the most fascinating personalities of the early twentieth century’s literary history.In the beginning I found her eccentric, but charming, but the more I read, the stronger was the feeling that her tone switched from funny to flippant and patronising either somewhere along the line or it had always been so. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.