... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suit… - Elizabeth von Arnim
" "... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals.
English
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About Elizabeth von Arnim
(née Mary “May” Annette Beauchamp; 31 August 1866 – 9 February 1941) was a British novelist. Born in Australia, she married a German aristocrat in 1891. Before his death in 1910, the couple had 5 children.
Also Known As
Pen Names:
Elizabeth
•
Alice Cholmondeley
Birth Name:
Mary Annette Beauchamp
Alternative Names:
Countess Elizabeth Mary Russell
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Countess von Elizabeth Mary Arnim
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Additional quotes by Elizabeth von Arnim
Father ... appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking that she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter.
Still, she did seem to have shrunk. Now why should she have shrunk? he wondered, aggrieved. He hadn't; quite the contrary. However, he mustn't mind. She was Fanny, presently to be his Fanny, and he mustn't mind any little alterations. What he did mind mind was that, like Soames, she appeared not to recognize him. She soon would, though, he told himself; and he went over to her determined and confident, lifted her unresisting hand, kissed it with all the fervor of happy reunion, and said with what he felt was immense tact and presence of mind, "I would have known you anywhere."
Fanny was much too astonished to speak. She stared at the head bent over her hand. Who was this bald man?
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What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I fell as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily.
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