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Elizabeth von Arnim

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Elizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim (31 August 1866 – 9 February 1941), born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was an English novelist. Born in Australia, she married a German aristocrat, and her earliest works are set in Germany. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth Russell, Countess Russell. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H. G. Wells, then later married Frank Russell, elder brother of the Nobel Prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Though known in early life as May, her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to friends and finally to family.

Arnim published anonymously, or simply as "Elizabeth", or on one occasion as "Alice Cholmondeley", and her work has been catalogued under various combinations of her given names, surnames and titles. Modern bibliography attributes her work to Elizabeth von Arnim, her preferred name when her literary career began.

She was born at her family's home on Kirribilli Point in Sydney, Australia, to Henry Herron Beauchamp (1825–1907), a wealthy shipping merchant, and Elizabeth (nicknamed Louey) Weiss Lassetter (1836–1919). She was called May by her family. She had four brothers and a sister. One of her cousins was the New Zealand-born Kathleen Beauchamp, who wrote under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was three years old, the family moved to England, where they lived in London but also spent several years in Switzerland.

Arnim was the first cousin of Mansfield's father, Harold Beauchamp, making her the first cousin once removed of Mansfield. Although Elizabeth was older by 22 years, she and Mansfield later corresponded, reviewed each other's works, and became close friends. Mansfield, ill with tuberculosis, lived in the Montana region of Switzerland (now Crans-Montana) from May 1921 until January 1922, renting the Chalet des Sapins with her husband John Middleton Murry from June 1921. The house was only a "1/2 an hour's scramble away" from Arnim's Chalet Soleil at Randogne. Arnim visited her cousin often during this period. They got on well, although Mansfield considered the much wealthier Arnim to be patronizing. Mansfield satirized Arnim as the character Rosemary in a short story, "A Cup of Tea", which she wrote while in Switzerland.

Arnim studied at the Royal College of Music, principally learning the organ.

On 21 February 1891, Elizabeth married the widowed German aristocrat Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin [de] (1851–1910) in London, whom she had met on a tour of Italy with her father two years earlier. He was the eldest son of the late Count Harry von Arnim, the former German Ambassador to France. At first they lived in Berlin, then in 1896 moved to what was then Nassenheide, Pomerania (now Rzędziny in Poland), where the Arnim family had a landed estate. They had four daughters and a son, born between December 1891 and October 1901. In 1899, Henning von Arnim was arrested and imprisoned for fraud but was later acquitted.

At the time of the 1901 United Kingdom census, on 1 April 1901, Arnim was in England, staying with her uncle Henry Beauchamp at The Retreat, Bexley, without any of her children. Her son Henning Bernd was born in London in October 1902.

The children's tutors at Nassenheide included E. M. Forster, who worked there for several months in the spring and summer of 1905. Forster wrote a short memoir of the months he spent there. From April to July 1907 the writer Hugh Walpole was the children's tutor.

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