When Elizabeth von Arnim anonymously published her debut Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), she became a literary star overnight. The mystery surrounding the identity of this witty aristocratic diarist in her romantic garden kept readers guessing: Who was Elizabeth? A Prussian Princess? The daughter of Queen Victoria? Throughout her long and successful career as one of England’s best satirical novelists, von Arnim never officially revealed her identity. Instead, to her readers and friends she simply became known as “Elizabeth.” From her first book to her capricious autobiography All the Dogs of My Life (1936), throughout her career von Arnim would explore questions of identity and self-representation. And in spite of von Arnim’s love of masquerades and guises, her books include funny and surprisingly personal meditations on the challenges of being a woman writer wrestling with a masculine literary tradition, of taking pride in one’s commercial success while moving in Modernist circles, and of being both a hard-working professional and an elegant hostess. In tracing the conflict between femininity and authorship in von Arnim’s works, this book engages with key literary issues of the time. Von Arnim’s early books offer a witty critique of New Woman fiction. Von Arnim’s self-positioning on the literary market and her relationships with writers like Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf shed light on the relationship between middlebrow and modernist literature. Von Arnim’s complex autobiography, finally, gives a tentative answer to the all-important question: can a writing woman be a lady?

Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" was first published in 1898. It was instantly popular and has gone through numerous reprints ever since. This story is the main character Elizabeth’s diary, where she relates stories from her life, as she learns to tend to her garden. Whilst the novel has a strongly autobiographical tone, it is also very humorous and satirical, due to Elizabeth’s frequent mistakes and her idiosyncratic outlook on life. She comments on the beauty of nature and shares her view on society, looking down on the frivolous fashions of her time and writing "I believe all needlework and dressmaking is of the devil, designed to keep women from study." The book is the first in a series about the same character. Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), née Mary Annette Beauchamp, was a British novelist. Born in Australia, her family returned to England when she was three years old; and she was Katherine Mansfield’s cousin. She was first married to a Prussian aristocrat, the Graf von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and later to the philosopher Bertrand Russel’s older brother, Frank, whom she left a year later. She then had an affair with the publisher Alexander Reeves, a man thirty years her junior, and with H.G. Wells. Von Arnim moved a lot, living alternatively in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, before dying of influenza in South Carolina during the Second War. Elizabeth von Arnim was an active member of the European literary scene, and entertained many of her contemporaries in her Chalet Soleil in Switzerland. She even hired E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole as tutors for her five children. She is famous for her half-autobiographical, satirical novel "Elizabeth and her German Garden" (1898), as well as for "Vera" (1921), and "The Enchanted April" (1922).

Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues their skilful use of comedy and irony provided the receptive reader with subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life.

&‘When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy.' Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the early twentieth century's most famous &– and almost forgotten &– authors. She was ahead of her time in her understanding of women and their often thwarted pursuit of happiness. Born in Sydney in the mid-1800s, she went on to write many internationally bestselling novels, marry a Prussian Count and then an English Lord, develop close friendships with H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster, and raise five children. Intrigued by von Arnim's extraordinary life, Gabrielle Carey sets off on a literary and philosophical journey to learn about this bold and witty author. More than a biography, Only Happiness Here is also a personal investigation into our perennial obsession with finding joy.

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

THE STORY: When two frustrated London housewives decide to rent a villa in Italy for a holiday away from their bleak marriages, they recruit two very different English women to share the cost and the experience. There, among the wisteria blossoms a