The Pastor's Wife

By Elizabeth von Arnim

Book Overview

On that April afternoon all the wallflowers of the world seemed to her released body to have been piled up at the top of Regent Street so that she should walk in fragrance. She was in this exalted mood, the little mouse-coloured young lady slipping along southwards from Harley Street, because she had just had a tooth out. After weeks of miserable indifference she was quivering with responsiveness again, feeling the relish of life, the tang of it, the jollity of all this bustle and hurrying past of busy people. And the beauty of it, the beauty of it, she thought, fighting a tendency to loiter in the middle of the traffic to have a good look-the beauty of the sky across the roofs of the houses, the delicacy of the mistiness that hung down there over the curve of the street, the loveliness of the lights beginning to shine in the shop windows.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1517189098
• ISBN13: 9781517189099
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Feminist Novel

The Pastor's Wife has been called witty and perceptive, but it goes much farther than that. Just under the surface of Von Arnim's witty, civilized prose lies a fiercely brilliant feminist novel, burning with quiet rage. Von Arnim details every step of the way by which a well-meaning English innocent, hoping only to live her dream of freedom, finds herself inescapably entrapped. A terrifying,subversive, wonderful book. It's a shock to realize this novel was written almost a hundred years ago.

Von Arnim's witty portrayal of fin-de-siecle married life.

This is one of Von Arnim's very best novels, full of surprising wit and sometimes caustic criticism of the lonely existence of an intelligent British woman in a turn-of-the-century aristocratic German household. In particular, the childbirth scenes are chilling, and reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, though Von Arnim typically treats the topic with more humor. The ending is as brilliant as those of her contemporary Edith Wharton.