Elizabeth of the German Garden: Jennifer Walker

Elizabeth of the German Garden
by Jennifer Walker
Published by The Book Guild

I was struck, reading this biography, by the number of parallels between ‘Elizabeth’ von Arnim and her cousin Katherine Mansfield.  Both were writers, both lived in permanent exile, and both struggled with questions of identity and belonging. ‘Elizabeth’ was born in Australia to an English father and an Australian mother, christened Mary Beachamp, and brought to England at the age of three, but her father had a habit of wandering around Europe, so she saw quite a bit of Italy, France and Switzerland during her childhood.  Like Katherine Mansfield, Mary Beauchamp was a musical prodigy who played the piano and the organ to high professional standards.  She studied at the Royal College of Music and, on a visit to Italy,  played for Liszt’s daughter Cosima Wagner.

It was here that she met the German Graf (Count) Henning von Arnim who made love to her on top of the Duomo in Florence.  She married him without realising what her life as a member of the ‘Junker’ nobility in Germany would entail, and the level of rigid formality did not suit her temperament.  With her husband’s encouragement Mary left Berlin for their country estate, where she began to create a garden and a book, as well as another persona for herself. ‘Elizabeth’ was initially a fiction, but eventually she signed her letters with that name - even to her family.

The book, Elizabeth and her German Garden was an unexpected runaway success to the extent that all her subsequent books had the author-line ‘by Elizabeth of the German Garden’.  Henning von Arnim features in the book as the ‘Man of Wrath’ - which gives us a glimpse of the state of their marriage.  Before the days of contraception, many relationships were ruined by a woman’s fear of pregnancy and childbirth.  The ‘April, May and June’ babies feature in Elizabeth’s books, but Mary had five children altogether, a boy and four girls.  Two of them were born without the comfort of chloroform, because the Germans didn’t believe in alleviating the suffering of birth.  After her first two, difficult, confinements, Mary insisted on having her children in England, but each birth was accompanied by dread, anxiety and depression.  She told H.G. Wells later that she only had to think about sex to become pregnant and had had to insist that she and her husband were not in the same house to avoid conceiving again.

Between babies, Mary wrote compulsively.  This biography is excellent on the novels that ‘Elizabeth’ produced in regular succession. I sometimes got lost in the discourses on ‘Elizabeth’s’ unfamiliar novels, but they are fully justified in their aim to re-establish Elizabeth’s reputation as an important writer in the first part of the 20th century.  Most people know Enchanted April (inspired by a holiday in Portofino) and Elizabeth and her German Garden, but other novels were more controversial contributions to the literature of the period and have long been over-looked.

Henning von Arnim had debts and money troubles (he was arrested at one point) and soon his wife was the major earner of the family - not easy for a German Junker to accept.  It put a strain on Mary too. She became a workaholic who sometimes neglected her children. One of her daughters, the inaptly named Felicitas, felt uncared for - packed off to boarding school and denied the opportunity to study music as a punishment for bad behaviour.  She died at the age of 16, leaving Mary with a legacy of guilt.

Mary was so committed to her writing that she even took employment as a governess for six months - ‘feeling perhaps that her life lacked the immediate experience of lowly status and poverty’.  For another novel, The Caravaners, she went caravanning - a hilarious progression through the west country with members of her family and friends, begging beds in people’s houses whenever possible.

E.M. Forster and Hugh Walpole came to tutor her children.  Mary, swapping lives between England and Germany, made friends with many members of the English literary scene, including H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell.  When her husband died, she became embroiled in a love affair with Wells, who was married and also involved with another woman at the time.  It was all very complicated.

Mary subsequently married Bertrand Russell’s brother, the Earl Russell, giving herself yet another identity.  She was now Mary Beauchamp, Elizabeth of the German Garden, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Countess Russell.  Author and mother, wife and lover, she had almost as many identities as her cousin Katherine.  Their relationship and the links between them, both personal and literary, are very well portrayed in this biography.  It also fills many of the gaps left by Karen Usborne’s previous biography.

Mary’s marriage to Francis, Lord Russell, was catastrophic.  She knew, even before she married him, that he was controlling and a bully, but she seemed unable to avoid her fate.  He locked her in the house, refused to give her a key to the gate and treated her to violent displays of temper.  Mary had hoped for a soul-mate, someone who would look after her, but found only a tyrant who wreaked havoc in her life and prevented her from writing.  As they both depended on her income (Earl Russell was addicted to Bridge and cocaine) it was essential for her to carry on earning.

It seems incredible now that a strong, independent woman should allow herself to be dominated and bullied in that way.  The marriage lasted only a few months before Mary went to New York to visit her daughter Liebet and began the gradual process of detaching herself. Earl Russell sued the removal firm who took away her possessions while he was in London, but Mary had carefully kept all the receipts and an inventory of the items she had brought from her first marriage. There was a hilarious cross-examination about the origins of a hammock. But it could be established in court that everything belonged to her.  Despite all this, Mary never sued for divorce and remained ‘Countess Russell’ until the end of her life.  Her experiences resulted in a dark novel called Vera, reviewed favourably by Katherine Mansfield.

Mary owned a chalet at Montana in Switzerland, the Chalet Soleil, where she spent many happy months writing and entertaining friends.  Katherine Mansfield became her neighbour towards the end of Katherine’s life and the two women were able to build a relationship which, though fraught with misunderstanding, was underpinned by real affection and respect. It was one of Katherine’s regrets that the cousins had ‘missed each other’ earlier in their lives.

Mary was having a love affair with a much younger man, Alexander Freres Reeves, the illegitimate son of one of her friends and the co-editor of Granta.  She employed him at first to catalogue her library in order to finance his university studies, but the relationship soon deepened.  It was scandalous at the time for a woman to have a much younger lover and ‘Elizabeth’ made it the subject of a controversial novel, Love.

Eventually Mary moved to the south of France, where she created another garden, and her love affair with Freres Reeves gradually burnt itself out as Mary aged.  She was by now over sixty and struggling to come to terms with her changing physical appearance. She had a face-lift and wore a curly red wig to conceal her thinning hair.  Like Katherine, she tried X-ray treatment, not for tuberculosis, but to reverse the signs of aging. The result was a small tumour beside one eye.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Mary, worrying about the fate of one of her daughters in Germany, went to America to live near another daughter, Liebet.  Mary died there in 1941, shortly after publishing her last book - Mr Skeffington - which controversially dealt with anti-semitism and was a big hit in America, where it was made into a film.

This is an excellent biography, giving much-needed consideration to ‘Elizabeth of the German Garden’s’ literary status and shedding light on aspects of Katherine Mansfield’s life too.  The wider Beauchamp family formed the context in which Katherine spent her early years.  Their views and their prejudices were important influences on the trajectory of her life as well as Elizabeth’s.  Also important is the extent to which Katherine may have been influenced by Elizabeth’s achievements. I personally believe that The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen might have been the book that paved the way for the Katherine’s In a German Pension stories.  Jennifer Walker’s book is a very welcome addition to the field of Mansfield studies, as well as an absorbing read about a fascinating woman.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
Biography by Galya Diment

Koteliansky - Kot to his friends - has always fascinated me.  He hovered around on the fringes of Bloomsbury - an unlikely figure - and was influential in the lives of Katherine Mansfield and DH Lawrence.  He was also a passionate advocate of Russian literature and translated a great deal of it into English, introducing some little known authors to a western audience for the first time.

Most people were in awe of his moral integrity and passionately held principles.  'Kot was not a comfortable man,' wrote Leonard Woolf in his obituary.  Kot had a crushing handshake and such an air of 'rightness' that some people maintained it wasn't possible to tell a lie in his presence.  Lawrence nicknamed him 'Jehovah' and Katherine Mansfield said that he reminded her of an Old Testament Prophet.

Until I read Galya Diment's biography, I hadn't understood Kot's complex personality or his background and I was completely unaware of the struggle he had to establish himself in London and support himself as a refugee with no skills other than literacy.  I was also unaware of the extent of anti-semitic feeling and prejudice in England at that time.  Virginia Woolf used to refer to her husband Leonard as The Jew in public, and even in his presence - Leonard did not interpret it as a playful nickname - he was grimly aware of how he was regarded.  Virginia had told him in a letter that it was 'his Jewishness' that she disliked and which had given her second thoughts when she considered marrying him.  In her 1915 diary she wrote; 'How I hated marrying a Jew!'

There were a number of other Jews hovering around the fringes of Bloomsbury at that time - the painter Mark Gertler was one of them and he too was a close friend of Kot, regarding him as something of a father-figure.

Samuel Ivanovitch Koteliansky was born in 1880, a year before the major Pograms against the Jews began in Russia.  He was born in the Pale of Settlement, in Ukraine, where Jews had been condemned to live by Catherine the Great (hence the saying 'beyond the pale').  Kot's father was a merchant and the family owned a mill, but their fortunes were declining with those of their race.  Kot studied at Odessa and Kiev universities and was politically active as a student, earning him the nickname of 'the anarchist' in London.  Anti Jewish feeling was growing in Russia and there were massacres and surges of hatred that led to Jews being accused of murdering Russian children in order to drink their blood.  Kot fled Russia in 1911 and came to Britain where he worked at the Russian Law Bureau, helping similar refugees.  For several years he lived in one room 'above the shop'.

DH Lawrence

 Kot had violent attachments and detachments where people were concerned. He idolised DH Lawrence, believing him to be a genius.  It was on a walking holiday in the Lake District that Kot sang the Hebrew psalm that gave DHL the idea of calling his utopian writers' community 'Rananim'.  Later Lawrence portrayed Kot as 'Kangaroo' - the character in the novel of the same name.  Lawrence had a habit of casting his friends as actors in his fiction.  The biography points out that the love between Kangeroo and Lawrence's alter-ego in the novel, Somers, may well have put into words the love, un-named and unacknowledged, that existed between Lawrence and Kot.

It seems probable that, although Kot had loving feelings and attachments for women, they were not of a sexual nature and that he was actually attracted to men.  As a puritan, a Jew with a Hasidic background, these homosexual leanings could not be acknowledged.  Certainly sexual repression and loneliness were big factors in Kot's bouts of severe depression and mental breakdown.

To Katherine Mansfield he was a constant, loving friend who forgave her all kinds of misdemeanors.  After the death of Katherine Mansfield's brother in France in 1915, Katherine couldn't bear to live in her beautiful house at 5 Acacia Road.  It was sub-let to Kot and a Russian friend and Kot was to live there for the rest of his life, opening the garden occasionally to fans of Mansfield who wanted to see the pear tree which had featured in her story 'Bliss'.  

Mansfield and Kot in the garden, by Beatrice Campbell

 Kot collaborated with Katherine on Russian translations - their last meeting only a few months before she died.  When her husband John Middleton Murry published Katherine's private journals and letters to himself, Kot was disgusted and regarded it as a complete betrayal of Katherine.  He had always disliked Murry and now he hated him with the kind of energy only Kot could put into the emotion.


Kot scraped a precarious living from journalism and translating, rarely having enough money for more than a bare existence.  He was helped by generous friends - Lawrence supplying a 5,000 word introduction to one of his translations knowing that his article would sell the book;  Julian and Juliette Huxley and May Sarton all tried to help his work; and HG Wells' daughter Margery looked after him as his mental and physical health declined. 

In 1936 he had a complete nervous breakdown and in the years that followed was subjected to several episodes of electric shock treatment.  His friend Mark Gertler committed suicide in 1939, Virginia Woolf in 1941, and the horrors of the second world war weighed heavily on Kot's emotional health.  Many of his friends and relatives died in his home town in the Ukraine - victims of ethnic cleansing.  In 1947 Kot also tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.  He was unsuccessful, but his physical health never recovered from it and he was an invalid for the rest of his life.  He died from heart disease in January 1955.

This is a very well researched biography, crammed full of historical and personal detail.  It brought Kot alive for me, and gave me much more of an insight into the difficult, fragile existence of Europe's political refugees.  Our attitude to asylum seekers hasn't changed a jot.  They are tolerated, but not really accepted into our communities with a whole heart.  They live on the fringes of our society and can never feel completely secure.  Many regard them as a kind of parasite, without realising how much they have contributed - culturally and in many other ways.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:  The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
by Galya Diment

Katherine Mansfield:  The Story-teller
by Kathleen Jones

What Light Can Do: Robert Hass

Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World.

I've always loved the poetry of Robert Hass, (I have his Apple Trees at Olema) though I had never read any of his essays.  Now, this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite books - on Kindle - and I'm buying a hard copy to read and re-read and underline and scribble in the margins - it's that kind of book.  What he says, and the way he says it, makes it a must-read.

In a week when Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot prize for poetry I re-read an essay sub-titled 'Poor Monkeys and the White Business in the Trees'.  It's a thoughtful discussion of autobiographical poetry about families.  Hass points out that it was a new subject when Robert Lowell published 'Life Studies' in 1959.  'It is a fact,'  Hass observes, 'that [you] can learn nothing about the aunts or the grandmothers of John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope... John Keats, Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning' from their poetry.  He also feels that it may be a particularly American phenomenon.  'American poetry is full of aunts and grandmothers, but French poetry isn't, or Serbian poetry or Arabic or Brazilian or for that matter, English poetry'. Robert Hass takes us through some theories of Why this might be, which I found fascinating.

One of the essays is a deliberation on war - particularly the Iraq war.  'How did this happen?' Hass asks.  'And why are ordinary Americans not being driven crazy by it?'  The answer he supplies is 'fear, anger and ignorance'.   How could ordinary people be expected to know that 'bombing Saddam Hussein because of a terrorist act perpetrated by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Muslim terrorists would seem to the people in the Middle East an act of pure aggression against all Islamic cultures by a power that could not distinguish among them.'  But government and the educated media should have been able to and Hass castigates them for their failure to do so, accusing them of 'morally culpable ignorance'.  He states that  'The moral and intellectual failure of American journalists and of political and policy intellectuals was breathtaking'.

There are several 'major' essays in the book;  one of them on 'Chekhov's Anger', which told me quite a lot I didn't know about the author's life as well as providing an illuminating analysis of the work.  Chekhov apparently began his career writing for comic newspapers and magazines in 19th century Russia - the same kind of 'penny dreadfuls' that Herbert Allingham wrote for in Britain.  Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf who had bought his freedom and become a bailiff - the classic case of poacher turning gamekeeper.  Chekhov's father was a small shop-keeper who went bankrupt when he was only 16 and the family moved to Moscow.  Chekhov began publishing stories, sketches and jokes to pay his way through a medical degree.  Soon he was keeping the whole family.

Robert Hass is very good on these early mass-market stories which were the 'equivalent of newspaper cartoons'.  it taught Chekhov a lot about writing - particularly economy.  This is Chekhov writing to Gorky - 'cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you like.  You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out'.

Hass points out that these early commercial stories have the same structure as the later stories that Chekhov is famous for.  'They depend on a surprise ending, usually, though not always on dramatic reversal, and the surprise in in one way or another wounding . . .  The gasp that the story evokes, the little cry of surprise and discovery, comes out not just because the ending surprises, but because it fits'.  The stories are also witty and it is 'the terrible presence of wit' that takes the stories from pathos into tragedy.  Chekhov knew what he was doing in his fiction and his drama.  'I finish every act as I do my stories;  I keep the action calm and quiet till the end, then I punch the audience in the face.'

Chekhov's anger came from the violent treatment meted out by his father, which he couldn't forgive, as well as the social injustice he witnessed in a Russia building up to civil war.  Anger, Hass observes, can be 'the wellspring of art'.  It reminds me of  Katherine Mansfield, who said that one of the 'kick offs' for her was a 'cry against corruption'.  Anger motivated many of her stories, and Chekhov was one of her big influences.   She too, wrote only short stories, never a novel.

There are other wonderful essays in this book - 'Howl at Fifty' takes another look at Ginsberg 50 years on and compares the style of it to passages from the Waste Land (I'd never made the connection with Eliot before, but it's so obvious I now feel stupid!).  He describes Howl as 'a kind of exploded, hallucinatory autobiography'.  He talks about the genesis of Moloch and observes that 'Moloch has still got hold of a good chunk of the American soul'.

I also loved 'Imagining the Earth' - his essays on eco-poetry and literature, and one on 'Teaching Poetry' which I can't even begin to precis.  It touches on the oral nature of poetry on the page - poetry is 'a kind of speech that's meant to be said by others'.   In other essays he explores the connections between poetry and the natural world. He is pessimistic about our generation's custodianship of the planet. 'What a depleted world our students are inheriting'.  Will they be able to save it? 'The task may be beyond us.'   But  'We have to act as if we can accomplish it, as if we can preserve that richness and diversity.  We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.'

I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves literature - it's a great companion volume to Robert Hass's collected poems too.  Thoughtful, profound, outspoken - the writings of a compassionate individual who is also a great poet.

What Light Can Do:  Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World.
Robert Hass.

The Apple Trees at Olema:  New and Selected Poems
Robert Hass.

Novels and Novelists - Katherine Mansfield on writing

Riddle: - Wanted a New World

‘I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose. I am a great deal shorter than a novel; I may be only one page long, but, on the other hand, there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality - a something, a something which is immediately, perfectly recognisable. It belongs to me; it is of my essence. In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer. Those who know me feel; “Yes, that is it.” And they are from that moment prepared for what is to follow.’
June 25 1920

Remarks on keeping notebooks. ‘It would be almost amusing to remember how short a time has passed since Samuel Butler advised the budding author to keep a notebook.’ Nowadays young writers rest ‘their laurels’ on them. ‘They shall be regarded as of the first importance, read with a deadly seriousness and acclaimed as a kind of new Art - the art of not taking pains’.
June 13th 1919
(Ironic considering that her notebooks contain much of her best writing and are nowadays what she is most famous for.)


‘Very often, after reading a modern novel, the question suggests itself; why was it written? ..... We cannot help wondering, when the book is finished and laid by, as to the nature of that mysterious compulsion. It is terrifying to think of the number of novels that are written and announced and published and to be had of all libraries, and reviewed and bought and borrowed and read, and left in hotel lounges and omnibuses and railway carriages and deck chairs. . . . .’
4th April 1919

KM laments the endless supply of novels all the same like freshly baked buns made from the same ingredients to be endlessly consumed, leaving the consumer empty:

‘We are quickly tired. Repetition - the charm of knowing what is coming, of beating the tune and being ready with the smiles and the laugh at just the right moment, no longer has the power to soothe and distract us. It wakes in us a demon of restlessness, a fever to break out of the circle of the tune, however brilliant the tune may be.
Jan 30th 1920

In ‘A Novel without a Crisis’ KM sets out what she is looking for in the plot of a novel.
‘... having decided on the novel form, one cannot lightly throw one’s story over the mill without replacing it with another story which is, in its way, obedient to the rules of that discarded one. There must be the same setting out upon a voyage of discovery (but through unknown seas instead of charted waters), the same difficulties and dangers must be encountered, and there must be an ever-increasing sense of the greatness of the adventure and an ever more passioante desire to possess and explore the mysterious country. There must be given the crisis when the great final attempt is made which succeeds - or does not succeed.’. Without this ‘central point of significance’, ‘the form of the novel, as we see it, is lost. Without it, how are we to appreciate the importance of one ‘spiritual event’ rather than another? What is to prevent each being unrelated if the gradual unfolding in growing, gaining light is not to be followed by one blazing moment?’
May 30 1919


Novels and Novelists - a collection of reviews by Katherine Mansfield which appeared in the Athenaeum between April 1919 and December 1920 edited after her death by John Middleton Murry.
More information on Katherine Mansfield's life and work.