Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim

 Love this cover image, The Letter by Mary Cassatt (1890). 

Another book that's been on my radar forever. I love Elizabeth von Arnim and I've been saving this one for awhile -- I read two by von Arnim last year (Father and In the Mountains) and though I still own several unread, I'm trying to ration them out -- I know I'll be sad when I've completed them all.

Anyway. Published in 1907, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther is a departure for von Arnim -- it's an epistolary novel, told in letters spanning a little more than a year, from a young woman in Germany (the eponymous Rose-Marie Schmidt) to her sometime lover, Mr. Roger Anstruther. Roger, a young Englishman of 25, has spent the past year boarding with Fraulein Schmidt, her step-mother, and her father in the small town of Jena in eastern Germany. Herr Schmidt is a professor and makes very little money writing books that no one reads, so the family takes in English students for extra cash. Rose-Marie also has a small legacy from her mother, who died ten years ago. At 25 (the same age as Roger) she is considered a spinster. 

Nice period-appropriate image on this German edition

The first letter is sent from Rose-Marie to Roger shortly after he departs Germany, and reveals that on his last day, he has professed his love to Rose-Marie, and they are secretly betrothed -- secretly, because his father will never approve. Roger is from a Good English Family who have a long history, but little money. Rose-Marie is considered middle-class and therefore Not Good Enough, though her late mother was English. Roger is entering the Foreign Service and is therefore destined to marry someone with money, and preferably someone whose social standing will help advance his career. 

After a few months, [MILD SPOILER ALERT] Roger breaks off the engagement because, as predicted, he needs to marry someone with money. He then becomes betrothed to the perfect girl, but continues to write as a friend to Rose-Marie. The letters become more formal but it's pretty clear that they still care for one another -- but how much? Does Rose-Marie still love him? Can she forgive him, or has she moved on? Does he even deserve her? 

This cover art is from an 1883 painting by Renoir -- too early, but I get why they chose it. 

I liked this book but it wasn't what I expected; first of all, the letters are one-sided -- the reader only gets Rose-Marie's letters to Roger, not the other way around. There are 83 letters, some very long, some very short, so there are no chapter breaks, and some of the letters are just solid blocks of text which are a little difficult to read. However, I loved the character of Rose-Marie and I particularly enjoyed learning about her life in Germany. I could easily picture the little town of Jena, which is a real place about halfway between Frankfurt and Dresden, not far from the border of Czechia. It's about a four-hour drive from my village in the Rhineland, and I'm sorry I didn't read the book sooner so I could have made a weekend trip to visit the area and get a real look at it. 

Rose-Marie is a great character and you really get to know her through her letters. She's very smart and funny and has to put up with a lot, with her absent-minded father and her overbearing stepmother, not to mention all the village biddies who make cracks about her unmarried state. Parts of the book do veer into the philosophical which made my eyes glaze over a bit (lots of love for Goethe, not my favorite writer!) but I did get caught up in the plot and I was really rooting for Rose-Marie. I particularly loved this passage in which she describes how much reading means to her: 

Try to imagine yourself in my place. Come out of that gay world of yours where you are talking or being talked to all day long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie Schmidt, alone in Jena, on a hill, with books. Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day of your life with nothing particular that you must do, that you have no shooting, no hunting, no newspapers, no novels. . . . Think of what writers are to me. . . . 

My one complaint is that it ends very abruptly, and the reader doesn't really learn what happens to Rose-Marie. I was rather gobsmacked about the ending -- I really wanted more resolution! However, I did really enjoy this book. I still have four unread books by Elizabeth von Arnim on my shelves and will probably read at least one more of her books this year, probably The Caravaners, which I'm planning to read (finally!) as my Travel or Journey Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge.

I'm counting this as my German book for the European Reading Challenge. 

Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters, 1936-1939

One of the nicest perks of working in a library was getting first pick of the donated books for the semi-annual Friends of the Library sales. Gone with the Wind was one of my all-time favorites, so I was naturally intrigued by Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Letters, 1936-1949, and was happy to part with $1 for this edition from 1976. Of course it only took me five years to get around to finally reading it.

As the title indicates, this book is a collection of letters written by Margaret Mitchell regarding her iconic novel Gone With the Wind, first published in 1936 and famously adapted into a blockbuster movie in 1939. It's a really interesting chronicle of how GWTW exploded into an international phenomenon and affected Mitchell for the rest of her life, not to mention her husband and indeed the city of Atlanta. The letters are chatty and for the most part interesting, and it's quite fascinating to see how this novel became such as sensation. 

Margaret Mitchell was a born-and-bred Atlantean, and grew up hearing stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in 1900 and attended Smith College and originally hoped to become a psychologist, but left college when her mother died suddenly and never graduated. She returned to Atlanta to keep house for her father and eventually got a job as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal in the early 1920s. After her marriage to attorney John Marsh, she suffered an ankle injury that didn't heal, so she was forced to quit her job. Spending months bedridden, she read nearly every book in the library and out of frustration, her husband brought her a stack of paper and a typewriter and told her to write her own novel, which she did over a period of about three years. 

The novel then lay unpublished in manuscript form for several years, until MacMillan editor Harold Latham came to town. Goaded by a braggart acquaintance who claimed her own manuscript would win a Pulitzer while Mitchell's would never be published, Margaret grabbed most of the envelopes with the manuscripts and gave them to Latham as he was getting on the train, so that "at least she could claim that she'd been refused by the very best publisher." She was given a contract and merely hoped that the publishers would make enough to cover their costs, never dreaming that it would be of interest to anyone but the most hard-core Atlanta fans and Civil War buffs. 

GWTW then became a massive success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming one of the best-selling novels of all time. The book of letters was really interesting to me, to see her perspective and all the problems the attention from her book created, with fans constantly hounding her for autographs, other authors claiming plagiarism, issues from foreign publishers pirating the books, and then the whole circus that erupted after the movie adaptation was announced. It was an absolute circus, and I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been today with the internet and social media. Mitchell was basically hounded for the rest of her life, and never had time to write another book. With all the hullaballoo, I I'd be surprised if she weren't sick to death of it, not to mention the pressure she would have been under if she had written a second book. 

This book is very interesting to learn the context of the publishing and the movie adaptation, especially with the looming backdrop of WWII. There are also a lot of letters written to other authors that she enjoyed, mostly history but there are poets and other contemporary authors mentioned, including Betty Smith who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was also delighted to find a letter from 1946 to a writer from the New York Herald Tribune in which she requests the address of Angela Thirkell so that she can send her a holiday care package during the severe rationing in Great Britain after the war. She mentions how much she loves Thirkell's novels and is about to read Miss Bunting (#14 in the Barsetshire series, which I haven't yet read). 

For me, the collection of letters did rather slow down after the war years, I suppose because much of the attention toward GWTW had died down. The last letter included is from July 1949, just a few weeks before Mitchell's death after being hit by a drunk driver. The book ends after the last letter, without any mention of her death, or any biographical details, so I suppose I'll have to track down a biography, and of course I have to watch the film adaptation of GWTW, now that I've already re-read that book as well. 

But that's three books finished for the TBR Pile Challenge -- I still have a biography of Edith Wharton and a memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, so that makes four books by and about 20th century female authors for this challenge. 

Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49

I'm finally making some real progress with my TBR Pile Challenge list.  However, I skipped over the actual selections and read one of the alternates:  Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 is a nonfiction book, selections from her diaries during WWII.  When the war breaks out, Nella Last is a middle-aged housewife, mother of two adult sons, living in Barrow-in-Furness, England, a port town north of Liverpool and Manchester.  Nella was participating in the Mass Observation project, in which she sent weekly installments observing her life and how it changed during wartime.  Her youngest son Cliff volunteers and is eventually posted to the Middle East; her older son Arthur is sent to Northern Ireland. Nella chronicles her days as a housewife coping with the changes due to the war, her fears for the safety of her children and her community; and writes about her participation in the local Centre, the soldier's Canteen, and her volunteer work at a Red Cross thrift shop which donates care packages to POWs.  I'm really interested by the WWII era, especially how it affected people on the home front, more so than military stories.

This book took a lot longer than I expected.  It's ten chapters of diary entries from 1939 until 1945, and it's only about 300 pages long, so there are a lot of short sections -- easy to read just a little bit at a time. But parts of this book were very painful to read about.  I'm usually fascinated by the aspects of war viewed from the home front, but the fact that it isn't fiction made it harder -- Nella was a real person, and this whole time was so difficult for her and everyone else in her situation.

As an American who's never had to live through anything remotely like this, I felt so bad reading her diaries -- not just about the fears of the losing friends and family, and the terror of bomb scares, but just the difficulty people endured every single day.   Gasoline rationing, blackouts, raising your own food, the scarcity of everything -- it just made me realize how fortunate I've been.  I wouldn't say I've had a privileged existence but I've never worried about having food on the table and a roof over my head and gas in the car. 

It was also sort of difficult to read about some of the personal issues Nella was working through.  Nella was only a little older than me when she started writing, though she was married much younger and her boys were already grown.  I got the distinct impression her marriage was not very happy; she mentions repeatedly that she's now standing up for herself more after almost thirty years of marriage; that her husband wants to be the center of her life, and that's she's recovering from a nervous breakdown.  After reading the entire book, I never did figure out what her husband's first name is!!!  I don't think she ever referred to him by his first name, just "my husband."  She mentions friends, relatives, and her sons over and over by their first name, but not her husband.  I'm not sure what it means but it doesn't sound good.

Ultimately, the book is uplifting, and we begin to see how her family and community are recovering from the war, though the rationing and difficulties are far from over.  There is a follow-up book called Nella Last's Peace which I'd also like to read, and a third volume, Nella Last in the 1950s.   I also own some other WWII diaries and nonfiction: Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson; Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson; and Our Hidden Lives by Simon Garfield.  However, I think I may take a break before reading any more books about World War II.