The Benefactress by Elizabeth von Arnim

If I told you I had read an Elizabeth von Arnim novel in which a woman decides to invite three other women she’s never met to live with her in a European country, and that they all start off a bit prickly but gradually warm to each other, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that I meant The Enchanted April. It turns out, though, that von Arnim had a bit of a trial run for that novel – 21 years before The Enchanted April was published was The Benefactress (1901).

The heroine is introduced in the opening lines in von Arnim’s characteristically witty, slightly cynical prose:

When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it, a wonderful thing happened.

She lives in some privilege, after her brother married a nouveau riche young woman, but even from her youngest years Anna has been drawn towards a more honest, hard-working life. Which is somehow immortalised in the idea of sweeping crossings.

When she was younger and more high-flown she sometimes talked of sweeping crossings; but her sister-in-law Susie would not hear of crossings, and dressed her beautifully, and took her out, and made her dance and dine and do as other girls did, being of opinion that a rich husband of good position was more satisfactory than crossings, and far more likely to make some return for all the expenses she had had.

There is a lot of delightful stuff about the contrast between forthright sister-in-law’s wealth and the meek family’s own heritage, all the sort of class vs money material that can be treated in any number of ways and was treated in more or less every conceivable way by novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. In the case of The Benefactress, it is all a little frothy and enjoyable, and even Anna’s conception of honest hard work probably bears little comparison to the hard working of the servant classes. Von Arnim is not a writer of gritty class realism, and that’s fine. But it’s also all slightly immaterial to what follows, because Anna’s brother and sister-in-law are not big players in the novel. I rather missed them once they were gone, but the whole thing is really just leading up to her mysteriously receiving a legacy of a house in Germany.

This bequest comes from a German uncle whom Anna spends time with shortly before his death – and seems to be impelled by a shared exhaustion in relation to the sister-in-law as much as anything else. Anna sees it as a providential way of avoiding having to marry someone, and heads off to this house…

A low, white, two-storied house, separated from the forest only by a circular grass plot and a ditch with half-melted snow in it and muddy water, a house apparently quite by itself among the creaking pines, neither very old nor very new, with a great many windows, and a brown-tiled roof, was the home bestowed by Uncle Joachim on his dear and only niece Anna.

As the title of the novel is The Benefactress rather than The Heiress, you’ve probably guessed that this isn’t the end of the story. Anna decides to use the home as a refuge for gentlewomen who are down on their luck financially. She has hopes of eventually helping dozens of such women, but starts small – with just three women, from the many who answer her advertisement.

Frau von Treumann and baroness Elmreich are quite similar at first – snobbish women who may have fallen on bad times, but have no intention of letting that warm them to their less fortunate neighbours. Their good name, good families, and good past are more or less the only things they have to cling to. Anna may be doing them a good turn, but they see it as little less than their due, and certainly don’t show much gratitude. The third woman, Fräulein Kuhräuber, comes from less elevated stock – and there is little friendship between the three recipients of Anna’s generosity.

Alongside all of this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a romantic plot. Several people think that beautiful Anna must be in want of a husband – this leads to the arrival of one of the gentlewoman’s horrendous son, an entanglement with a local curate, and a genuine friendship with local landowner Axel. He is drawn with beautiful restraint, and von Arnim knows how to give him exactly the qualities that will charm the reader while also being the dependable companion that Anna will inevitably realise she needs. I will quote Claire’s review (linked below):

Axel is my favourite type of male hero – quiet, calm, responsible, stable – and my sympathies were all with him as he struggled to counsel Anna on her project, though in her enthusiasm she refuses to listen to any warnings, and then to conceal his love for her, knowing that any offer he made would be rejected.

I’d normally feel a bit short-changed if a feminist tale of independence and marriage-resisting led to a woman realising that, actually, she should get married after all. But von Arnim earns the pairing, and I felt more than usually keen that they would end up together. I was a little less invested in the fortunes of the house for gentlewomen, and got the three women living there mixed up a few times. The plots involving them get resolved quite quickly, and it’s all entertaining but not especially memorable. The introduction of Axel’s sister is similarly a bit of a distraction, though did lead to one of my favourite lines in the novel:

Anna thought Trudi delightful. Trudi’s new friends always did think her delightful; and she never had any old ones.

As you can see, von Arnim’s slightly caustic wit is certainly present in The Benefactress, and I enjoy the contrast of Anna’s naïve goodness and the narrator’s more cynical take on proceedings. I suppose, ultimately, the novel suffers a little by being so clearly a prototype for The Enchanted April – and I also think that’s why it doesn’t necessarily need to be a priority for reprinting – but it is a lovely read nonetheless.

Others who got Stuck into this Book

“Never before have I finished one of her books caring so much about the characters, as I did for the genuinely sympathetic Anna and Axel.” – Claire, The Captive Reader

“In The Benefactress, Von Arnim has given us a fascinating mix of characters with decidedly mixed moral standards, from whom Anna learns much in the course of her social experiment.” – Chris, Tales from the Landing Bookshelves

“I enjoyed The Benefactress very much. It’s another of those beguiling books where a house is inherited & we follow the attempts to make the house a home.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading