The Captive Reader

I think I will always remember The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight by Elizabeth von Arnim as the book that made me want to get an e-reader.   Just knowing it was out there and available for free was too tempting.  A humourous fairy tale-like story from my beloved Elizabeth von Arnim?  I had to read it.  So, unsurprisingly, this was the very first book to be loaded onto my Kobo and it was the very first one to be read.  And it was absolutely delightful.

The lovely Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz is adored by all who know her and has lived her life most comfortably in the lap of luxury.  She is beautiful, young, and rich and should really have no reason to want anything more from life.  She is perhaps a little too intelligent for her father’s liking, but she does her best to conceal her attempts at education from him.  The Grand Duchess had been similarly flawed:

It was what had been the matter with the deceased Grand Duchess; she would think, and no one could stop her, and her life in consequence was a burden to herself and to everybody else at her court.

Both her sisters have been married off and now Priscilla is the only one left, with gentlemen falling over themselves to make her their bride.  Before the novel begins, though, no really appropriate suitor had presented himself:

They were however all poor, and Priscilla and her sisters were rich; and how foolish, said the Grand Duke, to marry poor men unless you are poor yourself.  The Grand Duke, therefore, took these young men aside and crushed them, while Priscilla, indifferent, went on with her drawing.  But now came one who was so eminently desirable that he had no need to do more than merely signify.  There had been much trouble and a great deal of delay in finding him a wife, for he had insisted on having a princess who should be both pretty and not his cousin.  Europe did not seem to contain such a thing.

The Prince, having resigned himself to not finding a woman both beautiful and unrelated to him, has resorted to looking among his cousins and decides that Priscilla would be quite perfect.  Priscilla, having never given marriage much thought, does not agree with the perfection of this plan.  So she decides, with the help of her dear friend and advisor, Herr Fritzing, the Royal Librarian, to run away:

Priscilla wanted to run away.  This, I believe, is considered an awful thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody’s wife.  If it were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would not at some time or other have run.  She might come back, but she would surely have gone.

She wants to run away from the charming castle she lives in, from her father the Grand Duke, and most especially from the proposed marriage with the prince.  She is tired of her privileged and exhausting lifestyle and wants to live quietly and simply in the country.  England, she says, is the only place to go, its picturesque cottages matching exactly the vision she has for her new life.  So, with “the tremendous daring of absolute inexperience”, Priscilla and the devoted Fritzi set off, with Priscilla’s maid Annalise in attendance (Annalise having been chosen chiefly because her greed over promised wages made her the least likely to blab about the plan).

I really think it is a tragedy that so few of von Arnim’s novels feature sea voyages because she writes rather wonderfully about seasick characters and those who come into contact with them.  Fritzi does not do well on the short and very calm voyage from France to England, raising and then dashing the hopes of his fellow travellers:

He clung to the rail, staring miserably over the side into the oily water.  Some of the passengers lingered to watch him, at first because they thought he was going to be seasick with so little provocation that it amounted to genius, and afterwards because they were sure he must want to commit suicide.  When they found that time passed and he did neither, he became unpopular, and they went away and left him altogether and contemptuously alone.

Once arrived in England, the three runaways settle down in a small village where, in a remarkably short period of time, they cause much confusion and several tragedies among the locals.  Unsurprisingly, the lovely Priscilla, who came to England partly to escape male attentions, immediately attracts the admiration of two youths of her own age: the frail Tussie and the cheerful Robin.  Equally unsurprisingly, the mothers of these two young men are less than thrilled by the arrival of the mysterious young woman and are irritated by the amount of chaos she has brought into their lives and the village in general.

With limited funds and very little practical knowledge, the deeply mismatched trio of Priscilla, Fritzi, and Annalise soon run into trouble.  “Truly,” the narrator reminds us as they stumble from crisis to crisis, “it is a great art, that of running away, and needs incessant practice.”  They made no plans for transferring their money from Germany, they buy completely impractical cottages that they have no idea how to manage and forget to hire housekeepers, maids or cooks (something they only recall when meal time arrives and there is no meal waiting – poor Priscilla has many hungry days).  Priscilla, used to freely handing out money when visiting the people of Lothen-Kunitz, happily does the same in her new village – quickly earning their love and depleting Fritzi’s reserves.  Everything she does is done with the best of intentions and in completely innocent ignorance and, unfortunately, it quite often ends badly.

As usual with von Arnim, this is not a novel of brilliant characterization.  I may have liked Priscilla and Fritzi and especially Annalise (she is wonderfully cold-hearted) but there is really no attempt to make them anything other than amusing, fairy tale characters.  The joy of von Arnim’s writing is in the narrator’s sharp-witted comments.  I adore her sense of humour and there was something to make me smile on every page.  There are a marvellous number of generalisations about both the English character and the German one and the prejudices these two groups feel towards one another.  The misogynistic Grand Duke’s rules for raising his daughters are also particularly fabulous:

The Grand Duke’s idea about his daughters was that they should know a little of everything and nothing too well: and if Priscilla had said she wanted to study Shakespeare with the librarian he would have angrily forbid it.  Had she not had ten years for studying Shakespeare?  To go on longer than that would mean that she was eager, and the Grand Duke loathed an eager woman.

I think a large part of why I enjoyed this so much was that it reminded me of von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus.  Christopher and Columbus is a better, more complete novel but the spirit is very much the same and there are definite similarities, particularly in each set of characters’ ability to quite innocently entangle themselves in local scandal.  The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight is a fun little story and I am so glad to have finally had the chance to read it!