The Enchanted April is a 1922 novel by British writer Elizabeth von Arnim. The work was inspired by a month-long holiday to the Italian Riviera, and was probably the most widely read of her novels (as an English and American best seller in 1923[1]).
Von Arnim wrote and set the book in the 15th century Castello Brown. Critic Terence de Vere White credited The Enchanted April with making the Italian resort of Portofino fashionable.[2]
The novel follows four dissimilar women in 1920s England who leave their rainy, grey environments to go on holiday in Italy. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins, who belong to the same ladies' club but have never spoken, become acquainted after reading a newspaper advertisement for a small medieval castle on the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April. They find some common ground in that both are struggling to make the best of unhappy marriages. They also reluctantly take on the waspish, elderly Mrs. Fisher and the stunning but aloof Lady Caroline Dester to defray expenses. The very genuine and open Lotty Wilkins, often muddled and awkward in her speech, has been married only a few years, but she and her husband are rubbing each other the wrong way; as the novel progresses, her intuition into her new friends' feelings and needs plays a major role. Rose Arbuthnot is a highly religious lady who does extensive charity work but is married to an author of racy popular novels who neglects her, partly because of her persistent disapproval of his work. Lady Caroline Dester is a beautiful socialite who is tired of the burden of London society and is beginning to regard her life as shallow and empty after a man she loved died in WWI. Mrs. Fisher is a pompous, snobbish, highly proper lady who knew many Victorian luminaries and regards herself as the hostess and in control of the holiday; she prefers to live in her memories of times past rather than embracing the present and is emotionally closed-off. The four women experience interpersonal tensions but eventually come together at the castle and find rejuvenation in the tranquil beauty of their surroundings, rediscovering hope and love.
The Enchanted April has regularly been adapted for the stage and screen:
...she decidedpro tem, as the vicar said at meetings, to put her under the headingNerves. It was just possible that she ought to go straight into thecategory Hysteria, which was often only the antechamber to Lunacy, butMrs. Arbuthnot had learned not to hurry people into their finalcategories, having on more than one occasion discovered with dismaythat she had made a mistake; and how difficult it had been to get themout again, and how crushed she had been with the most terrible remorse.----For Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged to live onthe proceeds of Frederick's activities, and her very nest-egg was thefruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin. The way Frederick made hisliving was one of the standing distresses of her life. He wroteimmensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the mistresses ofkings. There were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses, andthere were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings; so that hehad been able to publish a book of memoirs during each year of hismarried life, and even so there were greater further piles of theseladies waiting to be dealt with. Mrs. Arbuthnot was helpless. Whethershe liked it or not, she was obliged to live on the proceeds. He gaveher a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his Du Barri memoir,with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it seemed to her amiserable thing that there, in her very home, should flaunt thisre-incarnation of a dead old French sinner.