a German garden

The Systems Administrator woke up this morning feeling sick, and by early afternoon had given up and gone back to bed.  That's back to square one, then, after three days.  I merely felt very, very tired, until I'd eaten a bowl of muesli, after which I felt delicately and persistently nauseous.   Whatever this bug is, it's a nasty one, not spectacularly, vomit-inducing, feverishly nasty like the norovirus, but debilitating.

To distract myself I've been reading Elizabeth and her German Garden, a minor classic first published in 1898, and much reprinted since, including by Virago.  I picked my copy up ages ago at a second hand bookstall at some National Trust property or other, and it has been sitting on a shelf waiting for the right moment.  The book has been heavily anthologised, so that passages seemed oddly familiar, even though I was reading it for the first time.

The author, Elizabeth von Arnim, was married to a Prussian count, although brought up in England. This, her first book, describes her life on his country estate, where her great pleasure lay in restoring the garden, though she was also a fond mother to their three (at that stage) daughters, born in rapid succession and referred to, rather ickily, as the June baby, the May baby and the April baby.  They were then aged five, four, and three.  Goodness knows what Dorothy Parker would have made of it.

The gardening bits of the book are actually the least interesting, since Elizabeth knew very little about gardening when she started, and social convention didn't allow her to do much of it herself. We mainly hear her laments and self-reproof that she is so ignorant, mingled with effusions about how much she loves the garden which I should think Dorothy Parker would have responded to much as she did to Christopher Robin (Tonstant Weader thwowed up).  There are lists of the flowers she grew, which are interesting from an historical point of view, and confirmation that Prussia is a tough place for garden making (sandy soil, summer droughts, cold winters).

What lifts Elizabeth and her Garden into the first rank of light literature are her sly, sometimes acidic asides and observations about late nineteenth century middle class German life.  Her neighbours, house guests, governess and husband are gently but mercilessly lampooned, together with the social expectations of what women are allowed or expected to do.  Under the periodically gushing prose lurks a very sharp and protofeminist mind and wicked sense of humour.

In the light of that it is not so surprising that she went on to publish another twenty books, and had a three year affair with H.G. Wells, married Bertrand Russell's older brother, ran away to America, and had a romance with a much younger man who named his only daughter in her honour.