Elizabeth and her German garden. By

Elizabeth von Arnim (31 August 1866 - 9 February 1941), born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was an Australian-born British novelist. By marriage she became Gräfin (Countess) von Arnim-Schlagenthin, and by a second marriage, Countess Russell. Although known in her early life as Mary, after the publication of her first book, she was known to her readers, eventually to her friends, and finally even to her family as Elizabeth and she is now invariably referred to as Elizabeth von Arnim. She also wrote under the pen name Alice Cholmondeley. She was born at her family's holiday home in Kirribilli Point, Australia. When she was three years old, the family returned to England where she was raised. Her parents were Henry Herron Beauchamp (1825-1907), merchant, and Elizabeth (Louey) Weiss Lassetter (1836-1919). Arnim had four brothers, a sister, and a cousin from New Zealand, Kathleen Beauchamp, who later married John Middleton Murry and wrote under the pen name, Katherine Mansfield. In 1891, Elizabeth married Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, whom she had met during an Italian tour with her father. They lived in Berlin and eventually moved to the countryside where, in Nassenheide, Pomerania, the Arnims had their family estate. The couple had five children, four daughters and a son. The children's tutors at Nassenheide included E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole. In 1908, Arnim left Nassenheide to return to London. Count von Arnim died in 1910, and later that year she moved to Randogne, Switzerland, where she built the Chalet Soleil and entertained literary and society friends. From 1910 until 1913, she was a mistress of the novelist H. G. Wells. In 1916, she married John Francis Stanley Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, elder brother of Bertrand Russell. The marriage ended in acrimony, with Elizabeth fleeing to the United States and the couple separating in 1919, although they never divorced. In 1920, she embarked on an affair with Alexander Stuart Frere Reeves (1892-1984), a British publisher nearly 30 years her junior; he later married and named his only daughter Elizabeth in her honour. After leaving Germany, she lived, variously, in London, France and Switzerland. In 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, she returned to the United States, where she died of influenza at the Riverside Infirmary, Charleston, South Carolina, on 9 February 1941, aged 74. She was cremated at Fort Lincoln cemetery, Maryland and in 1947 her ashes were mingled with her brother Sydney's in the churchyard of St Margaret's, Tylers Green, Penn, Buckinghamshire. The Latin inscription on her tombstone reads, parva sed apta (small but apt), alluding to her short stature. Arnim would later refer to her domineering first husband by the Biblical title the "Man of Wrath" and writing became her refuge from what turned out to be an incompatible marriage. Arnim's husband had increasing debts and was eventually sent to prison for fraud. This was when she created her pen name "Elizabeth" and launched her career as a writer by publishing her semi-autobiographical, brooding, yet satirical Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898). Detailing her struggles both to create a garden on the estate and her attempts to integrate into German, high-class, Junker society, it was such a success that it was reprinted twenty times in its first year. A bitter-sweet memoir and companion to it was The Solitary Summer (1899). Other works, such as the The Benefactress (1902), Vera (1921), and Love (1925)