ENCHANTED APRIL in JULY
I recently read THE ENCHANTED APRIL by ELIZABETH VON ARNIM, a Penguin classic first published in 1922. It’s been a while since I read a Penguin classic and I found this delightful, full of wry humour and keen observations about love, longing, and how beauty in our surroundings can change our perspective, not only about ourselves, but how we feel about others, even those who are absent. Four women, strangers to each other, escape a dreary London, their mundane lives, a couple of husbands, to spend April in a castle on the Italian Riviera. Once there, in the ‘simple happiness of complete harmony’, one woman realizes it is ‘better to feel young somewhere rather than old everywhere’. They find their minds ‘becoming more luminous in the clear light of April at San Salvatore’. Another took off her goodness “like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy”. Such is the writing, prose of that time, with much head-hopping and an omniscient narrator, less common these da...
