The Enchanted April
The Enchanted April unfolds when Mrs. Wilkins, a shy, overlooked Englishwoman, spots a newspaper advertisement offering a small medieval Italian castle to let for the month of April. On impulse she enlists Mrs. Arbuthnot, a near-stranger from her London club, and together they recruit two more women to share the cost: the beautiful, weary socialite Lady Caroline and the imperious elderly widow Mrs. Fisher. Escaping rain, dull marriages, and constrained lives, the four travel to San Salvatore on the Mediterranean, where wisteria, sunshine, and beauty slowly work a transformation on each of them and, eventually, on the husbands who follow.
Beneath its sunlit comedy, the novel explores renewal, female friendship, and the quiet liberation of women from disappointment and self-effacement. Von Arnim suggests that beauty and kindness can soften hardened hearts and rekindle love. Gently witty and warmly humane, it endures as a beloved meditation on second chances.
How it begins
It began in a Woman’s Club in London on a February afternoon—an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon—when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eye down the Agony Column saw this: To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times . That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment. So entirely unaware was Mrs. Wilkins that her April for that year had then and there been settled for her that she dropped the newspaper with a gesture that was both irritated and resigned, and went over to the window and stared drearily out at the dripping street. Not for her were mediaeval castles, even those that are specially described as small. Not for her the shores in April of the Mediterranean, and the wistaria and sunshine. Such delights were only for the rich.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.