The Australian-born English novelist Elizabeth von Arnim published seventeen widely read and critically acclaimed novels between 1901 and her death in 1941. The republication since 1983 of many of her works by the feminist Virago Press and the release in 1991 of a motion-picture version of her 1922 novel The Enchanted April have led to a renewed interest in Arnim. In her novels female protagonists struggle to break away from oppressive family situations and restrictive social mores; the wit and sophistication with which she presents this drive for emancipation, along with her understanding of the conditions that often make such an escape both economically infeasible and psychologically improbable, inform her entire literary production.

Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney on 31 August 1866, the youngest of the six children of Henry Herron Beauchamp and Elizabeth Lassetter Beauchamp. Her father, an English merchant who had made his career in Australia, returned to...