The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904) by Elizabeth von Arnim was the result of my BookTube Spin #2, and a book I bought back in 2012. It’s the second sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden – I haven’t read the first sequel, but it didn’t seem much to matter. Indeed, I don’t think you really need to have read the first – ‘Elizabeth’ is just a handy way of crafting a persona, without any significant call back.

I love von Arnim a lot, but was a bit lukewarm about Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I read for an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ a few years ago. Perhaps that’s why The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen had been neglected on my shelves for a fair while. But I actually ended up liking this sequel rather more.

Elizabeth is off to Rügen – spelled Ruegen on the cover of my edition, but Rügen inside. Don’t know where it is? Fear not – the opening paragraph is here to guide us:

Every one who has been to school, and still remembers what he was taught there, knows that Rügen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

In the next paragraph, she says she wants to do a walking tour of the island. She seems to spend more of the book on wheels of one sort or another, but that is the declared intention. Nobody wishes to go with her, so she heads off with only an accompanying servant.

It has been a conviction of mine that there is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the frequent turning of one’s back on duties. This was exactly what I was doing; and oh ye rigid female martyrs on the rack of daily exemplariness, ye unquestioning patient followers of paths that have been pointed out, if only you knew the wholesome joys of sometimes being less good!

That gives an indication of von Arnim’s tone, which is in quite dry mode. Some of her novels are more earnest or melancholy, but this is one where she is using a tone of voice I much prefer – wry, dry, and quite ready to see the ridiculous in everybody she encounters. (One might also note, from a 21st-century point of view, that Elizabeth might be taking a break from her duties but the accompanying servant certainly is not…)

I don’t know about subsequent editions, but my copy comes with a lovely fold-out map in the front, as you can see at the top of this post. As the book progresses, Elizabeth continues to tour the island and mention the places on it – though my initial worries that it would turn out to be simply a list of places and sights turned out to be groundless. The tour is really only a premise for a very enjoyable story about Elizabeth trying to escape her life – and finding her life waiting for her, in the form of an unexpected meeting with Cousin Charlotte. My favourite sections of the novel dealt with her trying to avoid this burdensome cousin, who apparently longs for Elizabeth’s company while also judging everything about her life.

“I know you live stuffed away in the country in a sort of dream. You needn’t try to answer my question about what you have done. You can’t answer it. You have lived in a dream entirely wrapped up in your family and your plants.”

“Plants, my dear Charlotte?”

“You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer, where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your existence – no one could call it a life – is quite negative and unemotional. It is negative and as unemotional as -” She paused and looked at me with a faint, compassionate smile.

“As what?” I asked, anxious to hear the worst.

“Frankly, as an oyster’s.”

One of my favourite things to read about it is someone who is unashamedly rude, so long as the person they’re rude to is witty and blithe about it. The exchanges between Elizabeth and Charlotte reminded me a bit of Elizabeth and Lady Katherine in Pride and Prejudice, though the power dynamics are certainly different and Elizabeth-in-Rügen saves her outbursts for reflections in the narrative. Having said that, Charlotte is blunt and a nuisance, but she is not always wrong – she has a wonderful speech about how men don’t do any of the ‘female’ roles in the house, and rails against ‘smug husbands’ who ignore the ‘miserable daily drudgery’. Again, it’s hard not to feel that this would hold more weight for women without servants, but the general point holds.

Along the way, Elizabeth also meets some tourists she can’t get rid of – again, they seem unaware that they are unwanted – and she is very funny about them too. The whole book appeals to the sense of humour of the slight misanthrope – or those of us introverts who would be misanthropes if we allowed ourselves to be. I’m not sure I learned anything about Rügen in this novel, but I greatly enjoyed the journey and, for my money, it’s a rather more enjoyable book than Elizabeth and Her German Garden.