Book Notes: Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera

I always thought I liked Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a classic of the romance genre. But then I read the novel du Maurier ripped off to write her bestseller and found out that she had taken a fragrant bouquet and turned it into a herbarium.

Before there was ever Rebecca, there was Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, a real work of art that “inspired” du Maurier to rewrite it and make a hash out of it. I highly recommend getting both novels (Vera is free on Kindle) and reading them in chronological order. See for yourself which one your prefer.

Vera, a novel about a deeply insensitive, moronically narcissistic man who marries a young, naive idiot of a girl, is so well-written that you’ll laugh on every page. Von Arnim had a wonderful sense of humor. People find this novel to be dark and disturbing, and I’m sure that the conjunction of a scary plot and a humorous tone heightens the enjoyment for the readers. But the disturbing side of the novel is lost on me. I have a close, life-long experience of dealing with a clinical narcissist, and as a result I’m completely desensitized.

I understand, though, why du Maurier must have wanted to rewrite the extremely realistic Vera and turn it into a sappy Cinderella fantasy.

I’ll give just a couple of quotes, so you can see the delicious writing. A man is annoyed that an aunt stands between him and his beloved:

Miss Entwhistle was so little that he could have brushed her aside with the back of one hand; yet here again the strong monster public opinion stepped in and forced him to acquiesce in any plan she chose to make for Lucy, however desolate it left him, merely because she stood to her in the anæmic relationship of aunt. During two mortal days, as he waited about in that garden so grievously infested by Miss Entwhistle, sounds of boxes being moved and drawers being opened and shut came through the windows, but except at meals there was no Lucy.

And this is when a young woman’s friends discover she has a suitor:

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy’s aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim’s most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else.

A woman after an unpleasant conversation with a man feels uncomfortable that she had eaten breakfast at his house:

At the other end Miss Entwhistle was walking away lost in thought. Her position was thoroughly unpleasant. She disliked extraordinarily that she should at that moment contain an egg and some coffee which had once been Wemyss’s.

And my favorite:

All day underneath everything he did, everything he said and thought, lay indignation, and so he knew he was married.

Again, if I strain my imagination very strongly, I can somewhat intuit why people can be discomfited by the story in Vera. So be forewarned.

But it’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And it’s not in Spanish! It’s free! You’ll read it in a couple of days, I promise. I know everybody has a list of books they plan to read but this one is really worth it. The characters are out of this world. Even those who appear in just a couple of paragraphs are impossible to forget.

I also want to mention that every online source says that the marriage in Vera was based on von Arnim’s marriage to Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank. This makes no sense to me because Vera‘s heroine is an extremely naive, childish type, which is what makes the story work. When von Arnim married Frank, she was a widowed mother of five who had moved between continents and countries, spoke a boatload of languages, cohabited with famous personalities, and was 50 years old on her wedding day. So a blushing ingenue she was not. But hey, if every person upset with an ex came out with a brilliant novel instead of polluting social media with the boring details, that would be pretty great.