Elizabeth Von Arnim - Life

Life

She was born at her family's holiday home in Kirribilli Point in Australia. When she was three years old the family returned to England where she was raised. Her parents were Henry Herron Beauchamp (1825–1907), merchant, and her mother Elizabeth (Louey) Weiss Lassetter (1836–1919). Arnim had four brothers, a sister and a cousin from New Zealand, Kathleen Beauchamp, who later married John Middleton Murry and wrote under the pen name Katherine Mansfield.

In 1891 Elizabeth married Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, whom she had met during an Italian tour with her father. They married in London but lived in Berlin and eventually moved to the countryside where, in Nassenheide, Pomerania, the Arnims had their family estate. The couple had five children, four daughters and a son. The children's tutors at Nassenheide included E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole.

Arnim would later refer to her domineering husband as the "Man of Wrath." Writing was her refuge from what turned out to be an incompatible marriage. Arnim's husband had increasing debts and was eventually sent to prison for fraud. This was when she created her pen name "Elizabeth" and launched her career as a writer by publishing her semi-autobiographical, the brooding yet satirical Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). It would be such a success as to be reprinted twenty times in its first year. A bitter-sweet memoir and companion to it was The Solitary Summer, (1899) and The Benefactress (1902), Vera (1921) and Love (1925) were also semi-autobiographical. Other titles dealing with feminist protest and witty observations of life in provincial Germany were to follow, including The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (1905) and Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907). She would sign her next twenty or so books simply as written, "by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden" and later simply "By Elizabeth". In 1908 Arnim left Nassenheide to return to London.

Count von Arnim died in 1910, and in 1916 his widow married John Francis Stanley Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, elder brother of Bertrand Russell. The marriage ended in acrimony, with Elizabeth fleeing to the United States and the couple separating in 1919, though they never divorced. In 1920 she embarked on an affair with Alexander Stuart Frere Reeves (1892–1984), a British publisher nearly 30 years her junior; he later married and named his only daughter Elizabeth in her honour. From 1910 until 1913 she was a mistress of the novelist H.G. Wells.

Elizabeth died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1941, aged 74.