Cowslips To Kingcups: Finding Joy In The Garden

Elizabeth and Her German Garden
by Elizabeth Von Arnim and Elizabeth
Paperback, 207 pages

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:?Now our series You Must Read This, where writers recommend a book they love. Today we'll hear from Lauren Groff. She came across a book at a time of great anxiety when she was pregnant for the first time and scared about the future.

LAUREN GROFF: Staring into darkness, I wanted to read about happiness; I wanted novels that were full of joy. I asked my friends for suggestions but heard in return only a drawn-out buzz of bafflement. In truth, books about joy are hard to find because happiness is nearly impossible to write about. Narrative thrives on conflict.

And so, late one sleepless night when I stumbled upon "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" by Elizabeth von Arnim, I felt as if someone had thrust open a curtain and revealed a window where I had assumed only the existence of a wall.

Elizabeth Von Arnim lived her life among writers. The short story author Katherine Mansfield was her cousin. She employed novelists E.M. Forster and Hugh Walpole as tutors for her children. She was the mistress of H.G. Wells. Her milieu was literary, but her first book is urgent and personal: "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" feels as if it rose out of von Arnim's deep internal discomfort with the way she was supposed to fit into her world.

Still, what a fizzy drink this novel is. Framed as a series of semi-autobiographical diary entries, the book holds only the slenderest claim to novelhood in any conventional sense - it has very little plot. There are few characters: the narrator, a countess named Elizabeth on her isolated German estate, her three tiny daughters who speak a funny mix of German and English, her chauvinistic husband whom she calls The Man of Wrath, various buffoonish servants, and some visitors whom Elizabeth gently but thoroughly satirizes.

There is also Elizabeth's great passion, the garden, which we see in its shifting seasonal abundance from cowslips and kingcups to wild strawberries and rockets and azaleas to snowy fir trees.

That is only the book's surface, however. There are great, hidden depths in this narrative. Elizabeth is always comparing herself to the women around her and finding their socially circumscribed roles disappointing. Her happiness, when it comes, arrives as an act of will. Her delight feels hard won and it is dearer for her struggle.

I wrote this from my own winter garden, where my babies were whacking one another with brown sunflower stalks. I credit Elizabeth for showing me a way through my darkest time, by demonstrating that an act of focused attention can lift a person out of a long, dark spell. When the blues skulk near these days, I reach for my wry Countess Elizabeth. Anyone can get a little glow of happiness from living, even for a few pages, in her rapturous company.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BLOCK: That's Lauren Groff. Her latest novel is "Arcadia." The book she recommended is called "Elizabeth and Her German Garden."

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