Elizabeth von Arnim

"Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?"

"You see, what has happened has taken away my faith in goodness—I dont know who you are that I keep on wanting to tell things to, but I must talk and tell you. Yes; that it is what it has done; and the hurt goes too far down to be healed. Yet I know time is a queer, wholesome thing. Ive lived long enough to have found that out. It is very sanitary. It cleans up everything. It never fails to sterilize and purify."

"Father ... appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking that she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter."

"Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something."

"... Whether in or New York, London or , von Arnim’s settings almost always tell the reader about the insufferable constraints placed upon the women who inhabit them. Elizabeth von Arnim was also brilliant at men, or rather at skewering their behaviour, usually with the help of outlandish names. Married men, in particular, are targeted as they ignore their wives, whine about their misfortunes, or want fish for breakfast. They also lie, cheat, bully, and diminish. Von Arnim made frequent and barely disguised use of the men in her life. The husband of Elizabeth and her German Garden, based closely on her own, is referred to as ‘the Man of Wrath’, a bald-faced hint that, for all of its delights, Elizabeth was only superficially a book about gardens. Subsequent lovers, including H.G. Wells and publisher (thirty years her junior), also became fodder for her fiction. So did her second husband, , brother of the more famous Bertrand and a human bulldozer who pursued von Arnim in various forms for perceived damages long after their separation. Von Arnim tended to hide such unpleasantness under the guise of humour, at which she was unequivocally brilliant (P.G. Wodehouse must surely have been inspired by her novels). Clergy, relatives, dogs, and toddlers all come with laugh-out-loud descriptions, while her skill at satire rests upon ruthlessly close observation filtered through playful, often inventive language or placed in biting juxtaposition. But underneath – whether taking aim at dismissive doctors or overbearing fathers or the bizarre niceties of the – bristles a bitterness that goes beyond the waspishness of say, Muriel Spark, as von Arnim exposes the societal structures used to limit the autonomy and opportunity of her female characters."

"She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain."