The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Enchanted April
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It began in a Woman’s Club in London on a February afternoon—an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon—when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eye down the Agony Column saw this:
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.
That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.
The preview stops here, on the February afternoon where the advertisement is still only a paragraph in a newspaper.
Download Full EPUB1922
~78,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 4.4 hours
Standalone novel
London and the Italian Riviera, April 1922
Twenty-two chapters, untitled
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.44 MB (EPUB) · 0.56 MB (AZW3) · 0.47 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #16389
Four Englishwomen answer the same small advertisement in The Times: a mediaeval Italian castle, furnished, the servants left in, for the month of April, sixty pounds. Lotty Wilkins has ninety pounds saved pound by pound and a husband who knows nothing about any of it. Rose Arbuthnot has a nest-egg in the Post Office Savings Bank and a conscience that will not sit still. They take the castle, advertise for two more ladies to share the cost, and acquire a sixty-five-year-old widow who quotes Carlyle at lunch and a twenty-eight-year-old beauty who is tired of being looked at. They reach San Salvatore by night, in rain, four hours late, and wake to wistaria.
After that the novel runs on small weather: meals at half-past twelve, flowers changing week by week, a patent bath that explodes, a telegram that turns out to be the landlord rather than a husband. Two husbands follow, one for his wife and one for a face he has never seen. Nobody is defeated and nobody is punished; the four women get a month in which no one requires them to be good, and the plot is what they do with it. See Wikipedia on The Enchanted April for its reception and adaptations. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #16389.
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, first published in 1922: four women who have never met share a furnished castle on the Italian Riviera for one month, and the novel follows them through it. Von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney in 1866, was raised in England, and became famous in 1898 with Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a book about a garden written on a Pomeranian estate where she was happier than in her marriage. She took the idea for this novel from a spring spent at Portofino, in a house above the harbour, after the First World War had broken her second marriage. It sold very well in America, and it has been filmed.
The book has twenty-two chapters and no chapter titles, and it has almost no plot in the ordinary sense. There is one arrival in the first week, one husband in the second, one telegram and one landlord in the third, and a full moon at the end; between those events von Arnim writes meals, flowers and the slow rearrangement of four people who cannot get away from each other. The point of view moves between the women at the pace of a single afternoon, and the comedy comes from the collision of their private vocabularies. The garden works as a calendar, and the calendar is strict: by the last week the wistaria is over and the acacias are out. The chapters themselves are short, and the sentences are long.
Readers who like this book tend to like it for reasons that also recommend The Blue Castle, another novel about a woman who has been quietly obedient for too long and is given a season in which to stop, and Anne of Green Gables, in which an unloved child talks her way into a home and then into a place in the world. Pride and Prejudice shares the method rather than the mood: a small society, a great deal of talk, and marriages that are also settlements of property. All three books trust conversation more than event. Von Arnim’s four women are older and sadder than those heroines, and their romance is with a place before it is with a person.
The novel’s argument is unfashionably simple: a change of place can do work that sermons cannot, and being good without interruption makes people miserable. Lotty says as much in the second chapter, that it is wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable, and the rest of the book tests the proposition on four women who have each organised a life around a duty. Nobody is converted. Mrs. Fisher does not become a bohemian and Lady Caroline does not become domestic. What changes is the amount of attention each of them can spare for somebody else, and von Arnim treats that as a real and sufficient event, funnier than a plot and much harder to fake.
The text here is the Project Gutenberg transcription, number 16389, released in 2005, and it runs to roughly 78,000 words and twenty-two chapters with nothing cut, modernised or annotated away. The chapters are short, the sentences are long, and the narration slides in and out of four heads without warning, which is part of the pleasure and now and then part of the difficulty. Nothing has been added by way of introduction, glossary or notes at the end, so the novel starts where von Arnim started it. Elizabeth von Arnim’s life, the Pomeranian garden, the two marriages and her last years in America, is set out in the Wikipedia article on Elizabeth von Arnim. The full public-domain text is free to download above or to read at Project Gutenberg.
Historical Context
April 1922 is four years after the armistice, and the war sits under the comedy without ever being discussed. Lady Caroline is twenty-eight and unmarried, one of the generation of women for whom the war removed the men they might have married; von Arnim says plainly that the war finished Scrap, that it killed the one man she would have married and left her disgusted with love. The other women live on small private incomes, Lotty’s hundred a year for clothes, her ninety pounds saved coin by coin, Rose’s Post Office nest-egg, and the plot turns on what such sums will buy. A four-week let at sixty pounds is not a whim; it is an act of financial nerve.
The Italian Riviera in 1922 was an English resort as much as an Italian one. Shelley had spent his last months on that coast a century before, and the novel makes gentle use of the coincidence; Baedeker had long since mapped the villages, the railway ran to Mezzago, four hours late if the book is to be believed, and a fly could be hired from Castagneto. Von Arnim knew the ground at first hand, having spent the spring of 1920 at Portofino in the castle above the harbour, and she gave her invented San Salvatore the same battlements, the same steps down to the water and the same servants, Francesca at the coffee, Costanza at the stove and Domenico in the garden, who make the Englishwomen’s month possible and are comically unimpressed by it.
Mrs. Fisher is the book’s living museum: sixty-five, the daughter of a famous critic, and the possessor of a memory in which Carlyle scowled at her, Matthew Arnold held her on his knee, Tennyson teased her about her pigtail, Browning ate maccaroni beautifully and Ruskin gave her a brooch. Von Arnim uses her for comedy and for something more exact, the realisation by the fire in the last chapter that her illustrious dead have gone cold beside the living. The novel thus stages a quiet argument between two centuries: duty, references and the Archbishop of Canterbury on one side, a modern girl who says she dislikes being looked at on the other.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Lotty Wilkins: Lotty Wilkins is the book’s engine: childless, living in Hampstead on a solicitor’s income, with a dress allowance of a hundred pounds a year and ninety pounds of her own saved coin by coin. Her clothes are infested by thrift and she has learned to be invisible. She is also the one who speaks to a stranger in a club and proposes a month in Italy, and the novel credits her with the intuition that a holiday is a moral necessity. Watch her notice her own hair for the first time in years.
- Rose Arbuthnot: Rose Arbuthnot, married at twenty to a man who writes memoirs of the mistresses of kings, has organised her life into four facts: God, Husband, Home, Duty. She classifies the poor of her parish, keeps a nest-egg in the Post Office Savings Bank, and has the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna. Her goodness is real and also a habit, and the novel’s quiet cruelty is to show how much of it is vanity. At San Salvatore she stops praying, notices that she is pretty, and finally has it out with her husband.
- Lady Caroline Dester: Lady Caroline Dester, twenty-eight, nicknamed Scrap, has been beautiful since she came out and has spent ten years being looked at. Men’s faces leap when she enters a room; she says she dislikes it, and means it, and the novel takes her seriously. The war killed the one man she would have married and finished her with love. She comes to Italy for a month of being unknown, finds a hidden corner of the top garden and a friend in Lotty, and learns that thinking is harder than being admired.
- Mrs. Fisher: Mrs. Fisher, sixty-five, widowed eleven years, arrives in complete black with a stick and a demand for references: the President of the Royal Academy, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Governor of the Bank of England. Her father was an eminent critic; Carlyle scowled at her, Matthew Arnold held her on his knee, Tennyson teased her pigtail, and Ruskin gave her a brooch inscribed Esto perpetua. She believes that women’s heads were not made for thinking, and sets out to curb Mrs. Wilkins; by the last chapter she is holding that cheek.
- Frederick Arbuthnot: Frederick Arbuthnot writes, under the name Ferdinand Arundel, immensely popular memoirs of the mistresses of kings, Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l’Enclos and Maintenon, and before his marriage he was a blameless official at the British Museum library. He keeps two rooms near the museum, is often away for days, and is generous with cheques he never asks about. His wife’s religion bored him. He is funny, weak and likeable, and he comes to San Salvatore to see a face he has never met, which is where the comedy turns serious.
- Thomas Briggs: Thomas Briggs is not much more than thirty, an orphan and an only child, an Englishman who owns a mediaeval castle on the Mediterranean and lets it for sixty pounds a month. He waives the references because Rose Arbuthnot looks like a war widow, and he keeps a Madonna bought at Orvieto on the stairs because it resembles her. He has a warm domestic disposition and a settled plan to marry. Then Lady Caroline comes out of the dark into the sunset, and his tea is never the same again.
Core Literary Themes
- April as a loan of time: The month is the book’s whole device. April is a season of permission, offered by an advertisement and agreed to by husbands, and von Arnim treats it as a loan rather than a cure; her narrator says that April came along softly like a blessing, and means it morally as well as meteorologically. Because the lease ends on the first of May, nothing has to be permanent. The women can experiment with being different people and still go home at the end. That finiteness is what keeps the transformation from turning sentimental.
- San Salvatore, the house as a character: The castle is the fifth principal character: battlements, a watch-tower, dungeons, electric light, six bedrooms and eight beds, a top garden with only two ways out and one hidden corner behind the daphne, a zigzag path with a seat at every bend, and steps down to a quay where fishing boats lie. Its name, the Saviour, delighted the two women from Hampstead. The house allocates privacy and then forces company, and its rooms become moral positions: Mrs. Fisher’s honey-coloured sitting-room, Lady Caroline’s two-way room, the drawing-room that nobody uses.
- Beauty and the tyranny of being looked at: Lady Caroline is the novel’s argument about beauty: a job she never applied for, a sort of beauty-of-all-work, and it makes her invisible in a different way from Lotty. Villagers see two white doves when her feet show above the parapet; men flutter round her like moths round a lighted candle; she retreats behind the daphne and says she dislikes being looked at. Von Arnim’s comedy is exact here, since the beautiful woman and the plain one are equally unseen, and the ending gives Caroline the one thing admiration never gave her, a man she has told the truth to.
- Goodness, duty and the poor: Rose’s parish work is described in a phrase that damns it: she analysed, classified, divided and registered the poor. Her goodness is administrative, and the money paying for it comes from books about royal mistresses, a joke von Arnim never quite explains away. Lotty supplies the counter-argument, that it is wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable, and the novel tests the claim without endorsing licence. Rose’s final gesture is typical: she nearly puts a camellia behind her ear, remembers the poor, and puts the flower in water instead.
- Marriage, and the romance beside it: Three marriages are on show: Lotty’s arid solicitor’s household, where affection has become bookkeeping; Rose’s estrangement from a husband whose work she cannot approve of; and Mrs. Fisher’s widowhood, furnished with the illustrious dead. Against them sits Lady Caroline’s refusal of the whole arrangement. The novel is not against marriage, since it ends with pairs, the Roses on the wall and the Briggses in the garden, but it insists that a marriage is a room one can refurnish, and that the refurnishing usually begins with somebody saying something true.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Enchanted April?
The text is the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1922 novel, released in 2005 and unaltered: twenty-two chapters, no cuts, no modernised spelling, no editorial notes pushed into the story. Quotations on this page were checked against the same file, so the advertisement in the first paragraph is word for word what Mrs. Wilkins read in The Times, and the last sentence in the book is still about acacias at the iron gates.
The edition is built for reading rather than for display. Each chapter is its own section, the contents list jumps straight to it, and the file is small enough to open instantly on a phone, a Kindle or a Kobo. Three formats are offered because readers disagree about which is comfortable, and none of them is locked, watermarked or tied to an account.
Novels about holidays usually disappoint, because the holiday finishes and the reader is left outside it. This one keeps its promise for a different reason: the four women are recognisable, their complaints are ordinary, and the change that comes over them is small enough to believe. It is the sort of book that makes a wet afternoon in February feel survivable, which is precisely the mood in which it opens.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #16389 – the 1922 text, released in 2005, unaltered.
- Twenty-two chapters, nothing cut The complete novel, from the advertisement in the first paragraph to the acacias at the iron gates in the last.
- Contents that work on an e-reader Every chapter is its own section, so the contents list jumps straight to it and page numbers behave.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB on one page Pick the format your reader prefers; the files are DRM-free and small enough to email to a Kindle.
- The Blue Castle — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Anne of Green Gables — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Pride and Prejudice — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel has twenty-two untitled chapters. The summaries below take them two at a time and stop before the endings; chapters nineteen and twenty bring a man each, so they have entries of their own.
- Chapters 1–2: An advertisement in The Times: A wet February afternoon in a Woman’s Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. Mrs. Wilkins reads the Agony Column in The Times and finds a mediaeval Italian castle to be let furnished for April, servants remaining; she asks the stranger opposite whether she is reading about the mediaeval castle and the wistaria. That stranger is Mrs. Arbuthnot, who keeps God, Husband, Home and Duty in that order. They write to Z, Box 1000 for particulars, feel guilty at once, and the chapter explains what Rose’s husband writes for a living.
- Chapters 3–4: Sixty pounds and two strangers: The particulars arrive: sixty pounds for the month, servants’ wages extra, references required. Rose draws the whole sum from the Post Office and takes six ten-pound notes to a house near the Brompton Oratory, where Mr. Briggs, seeing a grave woman in black, waives the references and says the castle is called San Salvatore. To halve the cost the two women advertise in the Agony Column and get exactly two answers: Lady Caroline Dester, who wants to escape everybody she has ever known, and Mrs. Fisher, who offers three references and then waives them.
- Chapters 5–6: Arrival in the rain: The train reaches Mezzago four hours late; Domenico the gardener has sent his aunt’s fly from Castagneto, and the ladies climb a hill in the dark, surrender their suit-cases to boys, go down steps, across a quay and up a flower-hung path to a wrought-iron door and a flood of electric light. Lotty insists that the first thing to happen in the house shall be a kiss. She wakes in a whitewashed cell, opens the shutters on April, and sees a cypress standing in the view like a great black sword.
- Chapters 7–8: The housekeeping war: Mrs. Fisher is already at the head of the table, with the gong, the coffee pots and Francesca, and an air of being in possession. Rooms are redistributed: Lady Caroline takes the two-way room and turns it into a bed-sitting-room; Mrs. Fisher takes the honey-coloured sitting-room with a door onto the battlements. Below, the garden runs down in terraces to the sea, and the two Hampstead women take off their shoes. Lady Caroline, asked to order lunch, obliges once and then refuses: she has not come here to housekeep.
- Chapters 9–10: Two women and a blocked door: Mrs. Fisher fortifies her sitting-room against invasion, shutting the glass door and putting a cabinet of curios inside and a flower-filled sarcophagus outside, so that nobody can use it. Lunch is maccaroni, which she attacks with a knife and which reminds her of her husband. Lady Caroline is found in the one hidden corner of the top garden and offered castor oil; Mrs. Fisher tells her that women’s heads were not made for thinking and that a pretty creature should have been born fifty years earlier.
- Chapters 11–12: Invitations: Mrs. Fisher finds Lotty writing letters in her sitting-room and resolves to curb her. Lotty, penitent, posts a letter inviting her husband to San Salvatore; Rose cannot bring herself to write to Frederick, whose replies are hurried scribbles. That evening all four dine together, Lady Caroline in a shell-pink tea-gown, and Lotty observes how difficult it is to be improper without men. Mrs. Fisher, who had taken the Hampstead women for widows, learns otherwise, and retaliates by announcing a friend of her own, Kate Lumley.
- Chapters 13–14: The husband arrives: Outwardly uneventful days: the servants yawn, the four women keep their own company, and April comes along softly. The flowers change, wistaria over, Judas-tree fallen, double banksia roses out, and Mr. Wilkins telegraphs that he is coming. He arrives at the end of the week, is met by Beppo’s fly at Castagneto, and attempts the patent bath, which has printed instructions on the wall and the word pericoloso all over them. The stove explodes; he emerges in a towel and meets Lady Caroline on the landing.
- Chapters 15–16: Pay day and the cigar: Costanza brings the bills, and Lotty confesses the ninety pounds and the fibs. Mr. Wilkins takes it beautifully; Mrs. Fisher goes through every item and refuses to pay for another week unless the food improves at a quarter of the cost, and Costanza weeps. Later Mrs. Fisher finds Wilkins smoking in the hall; he drops the cigar into the arum-lily jar, where it smoulders among the lilies. Lady Caroline pays the first week’s bills as her present to San Salvatore, and the household settles into a guarded harmony.
- Chapters 17–18: The owner calls: Rose at last writes to Frederick and gives the letter to Domenico for the post. A telegram arrives, and she is certain it is her husband’s; it is from Thomas Briggs, passing through on his way to Rome. He comes up the zigzag path, asks Francesca for her mistress and is told there are four, and then walks Rose to the lighthouse instead of paying a call. He remembers her from London and says it is so like coming home. At tea Mrs. Fisher laughs for the first time.
- Chapter 19: Briggs undone: Briggs stays the night in Kate Lumley’s room and declares himself delighted with the whole party; then Lady Caroline comes out of the dark into the sunset, and he drops the teaspoon and rolls a macaroon across the floor. Scrap’s rest-cure is over. On the zigzag path she meets a well-known writer of amusing memoirs, Mr. Ferdinand Arundel, recommended by Lady Droitwich, who has come to Italy on impulse. He tells her about the oleander his father grew from a walking-stick, and dinner is at eight.
- Chapter 20: The brooch and the window: Rose dresses for dinner convinced that she is plain and that Briggs’s admiration has made her pretty; she nearly wears a camellia and puts it in water instead. Mrs. Fisher fastens her lace shawl with the brooch Ruskin gave her, inscribed Esto perpetua. Mr. Wilkins brushes his wife’s hair. Rose goes out to the battlements to watch the moon rise, is drawn by the firelight in the drawing-room, and sees a man standing at the window: it is Frederick, who has come to Italy without telling her.
- Chapters 21–22: The full moon: Frederick, who has come to see Lady Caroline and is known to her as Arundel, is caught by his wife and kisses her out of pure bewilderment. Briggs walks in on the embrace; Mrs. Fisher observes that this must be the last of the husbands; Lotty calls the evening a tub of love. Lady Caroline covers the situation without a flicker. Afterwards, under the full moon, she calls herself a spoilt, sour, suspicious and selfish spinster, and Lotty sees herself as the other half of Mrs. Fisher’s pair. They leave on the first of May.
The Enchanted April: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Modern Classics · The Blue Castle
