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1 - The Middlebrow and Comedy: Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim's Cultural and Literary Context

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Summary

The Middlebrow

The novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, sometimes assumed to be German, was in fact British. Born in Australia in 1866, she was the daughter of a wealthy British shipping merchant, and was christened Mary Annette Beauchamp. Mary, known in her childhood as ‘May’, moved back to England with her family when she was three years old, and grew up in London. Aged twenty-four, whilst travelling in Europe, Mary met her German husband, Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and through this marriage Mary Beauchamp became Countess von Arnim. The couple's early married life was spent in Berlin, and the difference between this highly restrictive, upper-class society and von Arnim's upper-middle-class English upbringing was profound; she struggled to acquire both the language and the necessary understanding of upper-class German etiquette. In 1894 they moved to the freedom of the Count's derelict country estate, which von Arnim fictionalized in her first novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). Published anonymously because of the disapproval of her husband, the novel takes the form of a garden diary. Whilst combining the 1890s enthusiasms for both garden diaries and suburban comedies, the tone of the novel is distinctive: arch, unsentimental, regarding her husband, whom she refers to only as the Man of Wrath, with a pitiless comic eye.

Elizabeth and her German Garden was a huge success, going into eleven reprints in the first year, and creating one of the great literary intrigues of the period as the press speculated on the identity of the author.

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Chapter
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Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel
Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor
, pp. 5 - 28
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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