When I was looking through my Virago Modern Classics bookcase to see if I had anything that would work for this month, I was pleased to see that The Solitary Summer (1899), though about 190 pages, had such an enormous font that it would be pretty easy to get through in a day.
The Solitary Summer is a sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, the debut novel (/autofiction?) that was an enormous success and made Elizabeth von Arnim’s name. Or, rather, didn’t make her name. She remained anonymous on her books, which were subsequently published as being ‘by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden‘, and ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’ was a concoction created, I believe, by Virago in the 1980s.
I courted controversy when I ranked Elizabeth von Arnim’s books by putting Elizabeth and Her German Garden in last place. You know what, I stand by it, but I should add that I’ve liked all of her books. For me, it lacks the spark and irony of her better books – though a lot of that was present in the third in the series, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. So, how would the middle of the three compare?
Elizabeth loves her home and garden, and the title comes from her longing to enjoy this happiness without interruption. Characteristically, she wanders around this idea in philosophical, whimsical styile before landing on it:
Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves. They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how can you make a person happy against his will? […] Obviously happiness must come from within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.
She puts forward the idea to her husband, known as ‘the Man of Wrath’ in a way that is intended for humour but doesn’t take an archeologist to dig into the discontent behind the quip. It is a little uneasy to see the lightness of his portrayal here – not the clever irony of Otto in The Caravanners, or the amusing-but-awful Father in Father. In the Elizabeth series, the narrator doesn’t seem to quite know if she dislikes him, loves him or tolerates him, the extent of his wrath is not discussed or even hinted at. A later von Arnim novel would be cleverer about it, one way or another. He has a rather stereotypical response to her plan:
“Very well, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, “only do not grumble afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose, and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective punishment.”
But the idea of the solitary summer is really just a hook to hang on whatever Elizabeth wants to mull over. For quite a lot of the book, unsurprisingly, that is her garden. I don’t know anything about gardens or plants, but I could still enjoy her enthusiasm about them – she describes them not just visually, but in terms of the way they make people feel and the life and energy they can bring to a garden. There are some comic scenes with gardeners, because of course there are.
And then, sometimes, she will use the natural world to swerve into quite sombre material:
There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs all our courage—the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each of us lives and dies.
It’s quite beautiful, and it’s a sort of sincerity that I’ve only seen her replicate (in-between the barbed comedy) in The Enchanted April. But it’s also a little jarring – I’m not sure she fully worked out the tone of the book. We have some enjoyable whimsy with her young children’s views on heaven; there is a section on a visiting soldier; there are homilies to the most delicious foods she’s eaten. Most awkwardly of all are her attempts to sympathise with the working-class community around her, though she is pretty sharply dismissive of a woman whose child dies in infancy, and let’s not say too much about her belief that she would thrive in poverty – a vision of poverty that is beyond Disneyfied.
This is sounding quite negative, but I did honestly enjoy reading the book. It had many funny moments and many poignant ones. Sometimes we moved swiftly from one to the other. But it all felt a little random and occasionally self-indulgent, and is clearly the work of an author who hasn’t honed her craft yet. If she hadn’t written such masterpieces later in her career, perhaps I would be more generous to The Solitary Summer. As it is, it’s a beautiful, entertaining… attempt.
Having said that, I had forgotten quite how old it was. Despite not really cohering into a novel, I had to admire the freshness to it. The verve of the writing feels much more 1920s/30s than late Victorian, and there is certainly a spirited energy to it. If you want to get the best of Elizabeth von Arnim, don’t forget those rankings. If you’re a completist, you’ll find a lot to love her. If you’re a gardener, you’ll find even more. But if you want to sample Elizabeth von Arnim and see if she’s the sort of author for you, I wouldn’t start here.