And what’s more it was numbered, as part of the Virago Modern Classics series-this, to me, was sophistication by numbers, with the promise of mastery to the reader who read them all!īut it was the graphic on the front that really sold me. It would reveal to me that secret history I longed to discover, a women’s tradition of writing. For the reputation of the Virago Press had infiltrated even the Canadian prairies by the mid-1990s and I knew that the distinctive green spine and the apple-with-a-bite-out-of-it colophon marked this book out as one worth reading. I’d taken my first sips of that potent cocktail called critical theory–Bakhtin and Foucault and Bhabha were invoked with the reverence of a true believer–but it was women’s lit and gynocrit that captured my imagination most at this time, which will help to explain why my eye was drawn in that basement bookstore to this particular book. It was the mid-90s and I was a freshly-minted undergraduate student of English literature, heady with newly-won independence and high on IDEAS. I spotted it in the stacks of a dusty second-hand bookshop on the corner of College Drive Avenue and Preston in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I am particularly fond of my first Elizabeth book, which was, incidentally, the first in the series: Elizabeth and Her German Garden. But to be clear, not all Elizabeths are created equal in my eyes. The irony of all this is that ‘Elizabeth’ herself is one of the old friends on my bookshelf and the Elizabeth novels are precisely those books that I myself pass with a nod and a smile, so well-known are their covers. Kindles are handy (what would ‘Elizabeth’ have made of Kindles, do you think? More on that below) especially on holidays when you’re limited to hand-luggage, but I must admit I still enjoy the bookiness of books as physical objects and it would be a sad room indeed without the cheering presence of these ‘friends’. ‘Elizabeth’ captures so well the affectionate feeling that I have about my own books, stacked in the study, in prime position on the bedstand, overflowing from bookcases. She’s speaking here about books and her love of reading in the second book of the series– Solitary Summer-but it’s a theme that pops up often in von Arnim’s work.

That’s ‘Elizabeth’, the first-person narrator of a series of book that launched the career of the writer we now know as Elizabeth von Arnim. “ are such special friends that I can hardly pass them without a nod and a smile at the well-known covers, each of which has some pleasant association of time and place to make it still more dear.”

Elizabeth and her german garden