Love by Elizabeth von Arnim – #1925Club

I have let my Audible subscription expire now, since I have such a backlog of downloaded titles I haven’t listened to yet (and since I discovered the free audiobooks from the library) – but, earlier in the year when I still have a sub, I listened to Love by Elizabeth von Arnim as part of their free Audible Plus catalogue.

I was pretty sure I owned Love as a print book, but I couldn’t find it on my shelves – did I lend it to someone? – but I’m delighted to have listened to it now, as it is now up there with my favourite Elizabeth von Arnims.

It’s incredibly bold to give a novel such a broad title, particularly when that title is the theme of more than half of books out there, so – what sort of love is von Arnim talking about? Well, it’s a May/December romance between an older woman and a younger man – but the man doesn’t realise that for a while.

Catherine and Christopher meet while in the audience for a play, The Immortal Hour, that they both love and have gone to see repeatedly. She is widowed with an adult daughter – by some complexities of her late husband’s will, she has been left with very little money so that she shouldn’t be targeted by fortune hunters. (What to make of this husband’s ‘thoughtfulness’ is left to the reader.) Going to the theatre is one of her outlays, but she does not expect to be intercepted by a young man – let alone one as boyishly enthusiastic as Christopher.

He is 25; she is about 20 years older. In the low lighting of the theatre, Christopher assumes they are about the same age – and, while she doesn’t intentionally lie, Catherine says a few things that mean he doesn’t put the pieces together at first. And then she runs with it (even though, as soon as he sees her in daylight, he is forever asking her why she looks so tired).

Catherine is flattered and amused, and rather bowled over by his enthusiastic romancing. And then… she falls for him too (although not until he has essentially kidnapped her against her will, which was a scene that thankfully would not be construed as impetuously romantic in 2025):

Vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love – fallen flop in love, like any schoolgirl.

Adding to the dynamics, Catherine’s daughter Virginia has also recently married, and has a young baby. Her husband is a clergyman who has long been a friend of Catherine’s – staid and wise, though himself silly and lovey-dovey when with Virginia. There is no disputing that Virginia and Stephen’s marriage is also a loving one – but von Arnim is drawing our attention very clearly to which age-gap relationships are acceptable and which are deemed beyond the pale. Quick clue: the men can get away with being decades older, and the women can’t.

Elizabeth von Arnim takes the story beyond an amusing premise, though. She asks: what happens if such a couple actually get married? Love perhaps isn’t as much a cautionary tale as Introduction to Sally is, and at least both partners are initially keen for the marriage to happen, but it becomes a much more sombre, serious novel as it goes on.

I certainly preferred the first half to the second. Von Arnim’s endlessly deft, light, sharp humour is on full display. She is very, very witty at the expense of pretty much any of her characters, while also holding up society’s foibles to ridicule – and, at the same time, recognising the very real impact they have on people’s lives, particularly women’s. As Ali points out in her review, von Arnim had recently been in a relationship with a man several decades younger than her, when she wrote Love, so she is being unsparing to herself too.

I prefer von Arnim on flippant form, and love her most when she manages to be ironically witty while still having a serious point (Father is the best example), and I found the melancholy rather overtook the irony in the second half. But I still think Love is up there with her best novels, and I’ll have to make sure I do have a print copy, if nobody returns mine. Did she earn the ambitious title? Perhaps that would be impossible, but she certainly makes you wonder about the limits that love can protect you and your relationship – particularly in 1925.