To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine

An introduction to October-November's book club

‘It began in a woman’s club in London on a February afternoon - an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon,’ begins the first chapter of The Enchanted April by the English novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. It describes what happens after the unhappy, downtrodden Mrs Lotty Wilkins from Hampstead spots an advertisement in the agony column of The Times. (More about the novel and its background soon… but first, a digression on the disputed spelling of ‘wisteria’ in the UK and how the author of The Enchanted April began to recreate herself under a new name: ‘Elizabeth’).

1923 edition of The Enchanted April

‘To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the Month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.’

A single word in this (surely one of literature’s most famous advertisements) has contributed to a long-running argument in the respectable pages of The Times. It’s a pressing question that has continued to be asked well into the twenty-first century. Should the correct spelling for the twining, leguminous, flower-laden plant be wistaria or wisteria? People who live in Wistaria Cottages have strong opinions about it, naturally, but they’re not the only ones. ‘Can I entreat your help in rescuing wistaria?’ one reader writes, pleadingly, in 2016. ‘The creeping substitution of an ‘e’ for the first ‘a’ has reached even the columns of The Times. It’s enough to make me hystarical”.

I have sympathy with linguistic sticklers, but tend to side with the argument that English spelling, like the language itself, is always evolving. It’s more usual these days for words to be spelt the way in which they’re pronounced. The informative and elegant Times style guide entry is worth reading in full on the vexed subject of wistaria/wisteria,¹ and I imagine the OED editor Robert Burchfield would have had something to say about it too (see my recent post ‘English as she is murdered’).

A glimpse of purple wisteria in Tuscany. ©Laura Lugaresi, Unsplash

Becoming Elizabeth

‘Elizabeth’, as von Arnim called herself pseudonymously, became world-famous following the publication of her first novel, Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). She was born Mary Annette Beauchamp [usually pronounced ‘Beecham’ in England] in Sydney, Australia in 1866, and the family moved to London when she was three. Known in her family as ‘May’, she became a star student at her girls’ school and decided that she wanted to study history at Cambridge. Poor health prevented her from taking the university’s entrance exam, however, so instead she became one of the first women to study at the Royal College of Music. There she discovered a passion for organ-playing, and decided to become a professional musician. But her parents had other plans for her.

In the hope of finding his twenty-two-year-old daughter a suitable husband, May’s father took her on a tour of the Continent, attending concerts and musical evenings. She preferred listening to Wagner and Liszt than the chatter of hopeful suitors, but she did fall in love during a trip to the Villa Durazzo-Pallacini at Pegli, near Rome. Her experience of such beautiful, romantic gardens was life-changing. ‘Emerging as she had from the gloom of London in January, nothing could have been better designed to make an impression on May at this stage in her life,’ her biographer writes. ‘Ideas associating paradise on earth with Italy and gardens were already being forged.’²

Soon afterwards, at yet another musical evening, she and her father were introduced to a Prussian Count, Henning von Arnim, in Rome. He was a widower, fifteen years older than May, who was struck by her petite beauty and musical talents. Von Arnim was an impressive figure who used his aristocratic charisma to bluff his way through serious financial difficulties. He began to arrange May and her father’s travels in Germany and wooed her forcefully, taking her to the top of the Duomo in Florence and telling her ‘All girls like love. It is very agreeable. You will like it too. You shall marry me, and see.’³

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Reader, she did marry her less than charming prince, but that certainly wasn’t the end of her story. Having begun her married life in Berlin, and become fluent in German, a visit to her husband’s country estate at Nassenheide in the spring of 1896 convinced her to move the family there. In this German garden she would write her first book and become ‘Elizabeth’. Over the next four decades she would produce twenty novels, a children’s book and a memoir called All the Dogs of My Life (1936).

We’re going to be discussing The Enchanted April (1922) in the ‘chat’ thread for paid subscribers over the next four weeks. We’ll discuss women’s roles in this novel; is it escapist fluff or a feminist fairytale? Why has The Enchanted April been dismissed as a ‘middlebrow’ novel, and what does this tell us about literature by/for women? We’ll investigate the significance of the post-war setting... and much more besides. I hope you’ll join us.

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For now, I’d love you to tell me about your own experiences of a life-changing trip when you were younger, or a garden (real or fictional) that has stayed in your memory. If you have strong feelings about wistaria/wisteria, I’d love to hear about that too. Thank you for reading, sharing, ‘liking’ and subscribing.

1. “Wisteria: now prefer to wistaria as the variant for the common name, after epic and absurd controversy in 2009 at The Times. The internationally agreed scientific name for the genus is Wisteria, hence, for example, Chinese wisteria is Wisteria chinensis. The plant was named by Thomas Nuttall, an English botanist, in honour of Caspar Wistar, an American anatomist and physician (1761-1818) and friend of Thomas Jefferson, but bizarrely he decided to spell the genus Wisteria. Wistar’s family came from Germany with the surname Wüster: one branch, so to speak, decided to change it to Wister rather than Wistar, which may have confused Nuttall (for more detail, see a passage and footnote from The Perennial Philadelphians, by Nathaniel Burt). Incidentally, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, the first American independent biomedical research facility, also commemorates Caspar Wistar.” (‘Reader warning: Times tides wait for no man’ The Times, 11 June 2016)

2. Jennifer Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden (Book Guild, 2013).

3. Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (Ashgate, 2013), p. xiii.