The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

At the start of The Enchanted April it’s a rainy day in London (the kind of day where you look out the window and see “extremely horrible sooty rain falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses”), and Lotty Wilkins, who is not looking forward to finishing her shopping and going home to have dinner with her husband, finds herself captivated by an ad in the newspaper. The ad is for a castle for rent in Italy, furnished, for the month of April. She’s so entranced by it that she mentions the ad to a woman she knows by sight from church, who has been looking at the same newspaper. That woman, Rose Arbuthnot, thinks of herself as too practical (and too busy with her charity work) to consider a holiday abroad. But when Lotty suggests that they write to inquire about it, Rose goes along with her, and they end up renting the castle—and advertising in the paper for two other women to join them to share the cost. And so Lotty and Rose (whose husband writes books about “the mistresses of kings”, which Rose finds shameful and sinful) go to Italy, along with an older woman, Mrs. Fisher (whose life mostly consists of thinking fondly of the past, especially of the various Victorian eminences she knew when she was young) and a younger woman, Lady Caroline Dester (who is very beautiful, and is tired of being pursued relentlessly by various men, and wants some time alone to clear her head).

I like the mix of humor and sweetness and beauty and seriousness in this book; I like the descriptions of the castle gardens (which are abundantly, riotously in bloom) and the way the characters realize various unhelpful patterns they’ve been stuck in, and the way that being away from their usual lives opens up space for those patterns to change. In her introduction to the edition I read, Cathleen Schine writes that this is “a novel about beauty, and it is beautiful; it is about the senses, and it is sensual; but, most important, it is a novel about happiness that makes one happy,” and yeah, that sums it up.

Highlights for me included the part where Lotty and Rose (who don’t speak any Italian) are picked up from the train station in a carriage, and find themselves doubting whether they’re being taken to the castle or abducted (“Ought they to pay him? Not, they thought, if they were going to be robbed and perhaps murdered. Surely on such an occasion one did not pay”), the complexity of the castle’s newfangled bathtub, and the last few chapters, where everything comes out right in a way that feels like a Shakespearean comedy (in the best possible way).