Mrs. Wilkins sitting in her women's club during a dismal, rain-sodden English winter, espies an advert in The Times for renting a castle in Italy in April promising wisteria and sunshine. She is intrigued and notices that Mrs. Arbuthnot, a distantly recognized acquaintance from Church, is similarly engaged.
"Why not enquire?" she suggests. Using her nest egg, patiently acquired from her solicitor husband's allowance and Mrs. Arbuthnot's savings from a generous, if distant, husband, it may be possible.
The inquiry must overcome several challenges - the expected disapproval of Mrs. Wilkins' husband and Mrs. Arbuthnot's conscience as to the source of her income, a conscience that rails against self-indulgence and prefers expenditure on 'the poor'. This sits uneasily with her husband who writes best-selling biographies of famous mistresses!
However, progress is made, and to further share the burden of the castle's expenses, two further women are recruited: Lady Caroline a young and very beautiful blue blood, and Mrs Fisher, much the older of the party, who lives steadfastly in the past admiring the number of eminent Victorians who formed her history.
All four women's lives will be transformed by their month in San Salvatore, the aptly named castle, that will save them by restoring them to their better, fullest selves and to do so through the experience of love. An impartial love that springs from the ground in the fecundity and beauty of the place; and, from a recognition of who without this grounding in love - impartial, forgiving, generous - they have become.
This love must, however, become personal. The loving spirit of a place must be translated into the minute particulars of four very different lives with different obstacles to acceptance,
The unfolding story reads both as an acute and compassionate social comedy, beautifully observed and commented upon, and yet as something deeper as it elaborates on the pathways of the four toward a greater joy rooted in love. For two of the women, husbands, renewed, are restored to them, to the eldest a new sense of burgeoning, greening life breaks through; and, for the youngest, the possibilities of a husband who honors but does not 'grab', that uplifts but does not confiscate the soul.
As Salley Vickers notes in her introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition, the last part of the book reads like a fairy tale, where happy ever after beckons, but this possibility is grounded in a very real sense of close observation of people's lives, their psychology and, most importantly, their hopes that in the end open up the grace to make lives anew.
Elizabeth von Arnim's own marriages were not a success and you sense this in her ability to depict the withering of combined hopes but you also sense her giving birth to roads not traveled (by her) but which yet she felt perfectly possible - a book of intelligently imagined wish-fulfillment! It is, also, periodically very funny!
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