 Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel, The Enchanted April, is – on the face of it – just a pleasant imaginary jaunt for genteel ladies amid the sun-soaked hillsides and beaches of the Italian Riviera in spring. But just beneath the surface is the most beautiful parable about heaven, and how higher energies can transform and illumine the human soul.
On the spur of the moment, four ladies decide to break out of their humdrum existence and escape damp gloom of a London winter that has stretched out into spring. For the whole month of April, they rent a magical, Italian seaside castle complete with servants and the most glorious garden. Its atmosphere of light, joy and naturalness, so dramatically different from the heavy, constrained, almost mechanical existence they left behind in London, quickly whisks them out of their old ‘habitual skin’, leaving them with a sense of ‘naked newness’ which not all of the ladies find exactly pleasurable, at least to start with. The artless Mrs Wilkins, however, has an immediate positive reaction:
Heaven
‘Oh!’ cried Mrs Wilkins. All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.
She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this... to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this... She stared, her lips parted. Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much joy, it was as though she were washed through with light.
Naked of all ‘goodness’
And how astonishing to feel this sheer bliss, for here she was, not doing and not going to do a single unselfish thing, not going to do a thing she didn’t want to do. According to everybody she had ever come across she ought at least to have twinges. She had not had one twinge. Something was wrong somewhere. Wonderful that at home she should have been so good, so terribly good, and merely felt tormented. Twinges of every sort had there been her portion; aches, hurts, discouragements, and she the whole time being steadily unselfish. Now she had taken off all her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy. She was naked of goodness, and was rejoicing in being naked. She was stripped, and exulting. And there, away in the dim mugginess of Hampstead, was Mellersh [her husband] being angry.
She tried to visualise Mellersh, she tried to see him having breakfast and thinking bitter things about her; and lo, Mellersh himself began to shimmer, became rose-coloured, became delicate violet, became an enchanting blue, became formless, became iridescent. Actually Mellersh, after quivering a minute, was lost in light.
Blessing
‘Well,’ thought Mrs Wilkins, staring, as it were, after him. How extraordinary not to be able to visualise Mellersh; and she who used to know every feature, every expression of his by heart. She simply could not see him as he was. She could only see him resolved into beauty, melted into harmony with everything else. The familiar words of the General Thanksgiving came quite naturally into her mind, and she found herself blessing God for her creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all for His inestimable Love; out loud; in a burst of acknowledgement. While Mellersh, at that moment angrily pulling on his boots before going out into the dripping streets, was indeed thinking bitter things about her.
A new beginning
She began to dress, choosing clean white clothes in honour of the summer's day, unpacking her suitcases, tidying her adorable little room. She moved about with quick, purposeful steps, her long thin body held up straight, her small face, so much puckered at home with effort and fear, smoothed out. All she had been and done before this morning, all she had felt and worried about, was gone. Each of her worries behaved as the image of Mellersh had behaved, and dissolved into colour and light. And she noticed things she had not noticed for years; when she was doing her hair in front of the glass she noticed it, and thought, ‘Why, what pretty stuff.’ For years she had forgotten she had such a thing as hair, plaiting it in the evening and unplaiting it in the morning with the same hurry and indifference with which she laced and unlaced her shoes. Now she suddenly saw it, and she twisted it round her fingers before the glass, and was glad it was so pretty. Mellersh couldn’t have seen it either, for he had never said a word about it. Well, when she got home she would draw his attention to it. ‘Mellersh,’ she would say, ‘look at my hair. Aren’t you pleased you’ve got a wife with hair like curly honey?’
From The Enchanted April, © 1922 by Elizabeth von Arnim (copyright renewed in 1996), published in the UK by Virago Press.
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Inspirational features 
