If you want a plot, skip this book! It is more a meditation on life lived with nature on Elizabeth's estate in northern Germany. She wants to spend the summer alone, without guests, absorbing the beauty of her garden, the fields and the woods, and thinking about Life. How alone one can be on an estate full of servants is not much addressed beyond the gardeners learning to become invisible when she is in the garden. Her husband, the Man of Wrath, and their three little daughters, the April, May and June babies, make appearances, and the outside world does intrude occasionally, but for the most part Elizabeth gets her solitary summer. Von Arnim writes with sly and gentle humor. There are so many lovely passages in this book! This is a sequel to "Elizabeth and Her German Garden," which is also a favorite of mine."What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.""How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floating leisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hot scramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at the vulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring and unabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are only pennies, after all -- unpleasant, battered copper things, without a gold piece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and the hatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of those above you who have more.""I wish I were not so easily affected by each other's looks. Sometimes, during the course of a long correspondence with a friend, he grows to be inexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine his intellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in great perfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity, after which I have been so long and so vainly striving.""If one believed in angels one would feel that they love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent, and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave, judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless, and forgiven."
What do You think about Un'estate Da Sola (1901)?
This was a pleasant read--a memoir about a quiet summer spent mostly alone in her garden.
—Amma830
Read February 3, 2004. 15th Book of the year.
—Ask
