The solitary summer

"Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, "I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow." This witty tale of a rejuvenating summer is a semi-autobiographical tale told in the form of diary entries from a nameless narrator. In it, a woman spends her summer in her garden, away from the social world that she was trained to reside in with all its rules and conventions. Despite the name of the book, the nameless female narrator does not spend her entire summer alone but is instead joined by her daughters and husband – the latter of which she has nicknamed 'The Man of Wrath'. A sequel to her famous début 'Elizabeth and Her German Garden', 'The Solitary Summer' will delight fans of 'Downton Abbey' and ´Bridgerton', whose narratives feature the same social world our heroine is trying to escape. Elizabeth von Arnim was an English novelist – a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield – born as Mary Annette Beauchamp in Australia in 1866. She married a German aristocrat and her earliest written works are set in Germany. Von Arnim launched her career as a writer with her satirical and semi-autobiographical work 'Elizabeth and Her German Garden', published anonymously in 1898. Although she was known by the name May in her early life, when she began writing, her success as 'Elizabeth' meant that her writings were ascribed to the name Elizabeth von Arnim.