The Solitary Summer

Published a year after Elizabeth von Arnim’s runaway bestseller Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Solitary Summer wittily recounts one woman’s effort to spend a summer away from social obligations to find herself. Set in the Prussian countryside where the Australian-born novelist lived for several years, the novel contains some of the most beguiling garden writing of all time. Shirking the duties of society hostess that are supposed to give her life direction and purpose, the narrator exults in the freedom inspired by a garden she tends with fierce and comic devotion, slyly evading those trying to contain her spirit. Charming, entertaining, and uplifting in celebrating a woman’s claim to freedom without forsaking beauty, humor, and love, The Solitary Summer brims with the unmistakable energy of a gifted writer claiming time for her own soul.

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) was an Australian-born writer who spent her life in Great Britain and Europe. While married first to a German and then a British aristocrat, and raising five children, von Arnim published over twenty enormously successful books, several of which have been adapted into acclaimed Hollywood films and BBC television series. The cousin of Katherine Mansfield, von Arnim was a member of a literary circle that included Hugh Walpole, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and George Santayana.

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University, a graduate of Harvard and Yale, and the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. He has published widely on poetry, fiction, photography, and written new introductions to many classic books, including von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Enchanted April, and Vera.