“… Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.” -Elizabeth Von Arnim “The Enchanted April
February is renowned for its bleak and unrelenting wintry days. Some of us are fortunate to be basking in mild temperatures of sunny skies of life closer to the Equator, but bleak mid-winter can be a state of mind as much as a climate. Whether the weather is getting you down or you find yourself lost in the depths of the forest of mid-life, have I got a book for you!
Elizabeth Von Arnim’s short and hilarious book about two disgruntled housewives who travel to an Italian villa is the perfect antidote to cloudy skies and a growing conviction that nothing is fun anymore. The story opens with two tired women, Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Arbuthnot, who happen to meet on an exceptionally dreary day and develop an unlikely pact to rent a villa in Italy for a month with two as yet unknown female traveling companions. What ensues are many comedic escapades and a surprisingly deep investigation of the women’s interior lives and the self-imposed limitations of their daily lives at home.
As an added delight, you can easily transpose the principles of “The Empowered Wife” to this entertaining story. I thought I was being too monomaniacal when this thought occurred to me, but other readers also noticed the surprising degree of overlap. All things that are true show up in any place there is realism. Mrs. Wilkins (Lottie) and Mrs. Arbuthnot (Rose) are both in what can only be described as sad marriages. For different reasons, both women have become withdrawn, muted, and unhappy in their relationships with their husbands.
It’s not that they ceased to desire something more. Von Arnim writes of Rose’s longing, “How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again – not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn’t seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one – oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious.”
The cure for their predicament, just as you will find in “The Empowered Wife,” is not couple’s therapy, aggressive boundary setting, or more laborious effort. What the women need is an experience of beauty. That sounds trite, no doubt, but Von Arnim does a splendid job of showing how the women—and their two traveling companions—experience the beauty of Italy in spring as a rebirth of femininity, a flourishing of gratitude, and sustaining draught of heavenly life.
A bit like Margaret Kennedy’s “The Feast,” there is this marvelous imagery of heaven on earth, pilgrims while still in this world summiting into the celestial heights. Von Arnim, from what I understand, was not a religious writer, but British literary consciousness was so suffused with Christian imagery, perhaps it’s inescapable. It makes for fun storytelling.
“The Enchanted April” is spectacularly dull read from one perspective. Like the servants at the villa who don’t know what to do with themselves while four tired women bask in sun and the scent of flowers, the reader is not treated to an action-packed drama full of plot twists. But there are some! The journey is less about the physical trip to Italy than it is about the interior development brought about by accepting a good and beautiful gift. As Von Arnim writes: “They left off talking. They ceased to mention heaven. They were just cups of acceptance.”
That’s especially good news for those of us who won’t be jetting off to Italy any time soon. That enchantment is attainable wherever you are, with magnificent and life-changing results.
I’ve heard the film adaptation is good, too.
