The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim

I actually read this beautiful copy of ‘The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim in April which is exactly when it should be read.  I wanted to make sure I posted a review of it before summer arrived and spring was but a distant memory.

Mrs Wilkiins and Mrs Arbuthnot are both women dissatisfied with their unappreciative husbands.  When they spot a notice in The Times addressed to ‘Those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine’ advertising San Salvatore, a small Italian castle available for the month of April, they are unable to resist.  In order to be able to fund it they recruit the beautiful but jaded Lady Caroline and the rather haughty Mrs Fisher to join them.  This month in April changes everything.

I am in danger of being overly gushing and effusive in my love for The Enchanted April so I shall try and restrain myself a little.

Each character has her own reason for being in Italy in April and as the story develops we are drawn in to their lives, relationships and characters.  Mrs Wilkins (Lotty) comes seeking escape and adventure.  She is charming and in turn immediately charmed by the beauty in which she finds her self.

“Mrs Wilkins longed to get up and open the shutters but where she was, was really so very delicious. She gave a sigh of contentment, and went on lying there looking round her, taking in everything in her room, her own little room, her very own to arrange just as she pleased for this one blessed month, her room bought with her own savings the fruit of her careful denials whose door she could bolt if she wanted to and no one had the right to come in.”

Mrs Arbuthnott is the saddest of the characters. She is deeply unhappy in her marriage to a successful author who writes books she is troubled by.  In London she buries her self in church and charity work.  She comes to Italy burdened with guilt and lack of self worth.  Her flowering and re-aquaintance with love is perhaps most touching.

Lady Caroline or ‘scrap’ as she is known is blessed with a beauty which has become a heavy chain around her neck.  She comes to Italy seeking solitude and peace.  At her tender age she is worn down by the endless attentions of would be suitors.  Even her she is followed by gardeners and doted on by servants, and she flees to the furthest reaches of the garden to escape them.

Mrs Fisher  is a terrible snob filled with a sense of entitlement and general disdain for all those around her.  She harps back constantly to the days when her husband was alive and life was filled with the great and good of the literary world.  She is of course rather unhappy and eventually even she is unable to resist falling under the spell of San Salvatore, opening herself up to its charms and finally her holiday companions.

Lotty revels in everything she sees and her enthusiasm is contagious She is the lynchpin on which the burgeoning relationships hang.  Her love of everything and everyone draws them together so that even the difficult Mrs Fisher is won over by her.

“Lotty back half an hour later from her picnic, and following the sound of voices into the top garden in the hope of still finding tea, saw at once what had happened, for Mrs Fisher at that very moment was laughing. ‘She’s burst her cocoon’ thought Lotty; and swift as she was  in all her movements, and impulsive, and also without any sense of propriety to worry and delay  her, she bent over the back of Mrs Fisher’s chair and kissed her”

“A queer little trickle of warmth filtered through the frozen defences of Mrs Fisher’s heart”

It would be impossible to read The Enchanted April and get more than just a few pages in without longing for Italy. In its own way this book serves as a travel guide, and promoter of dreams.  Who doesn’t want to spend a month quietly bathing in Italian sunshine, suffused by the scent of wisteria and honeysuckle.  Like many who have gone before me I am sure I finished this dreaming of how I too could escape to a pretty castle overlooking an aquamarine ocean.

“All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet.  The sun lay asleep in it, hardly stirring.  Across the bay the lovely mountains exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword”

The Enchanted April is escapism at its best, and would be glorious to read anytime of year but reading it in spring made it that little bit more enchanting.

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