Description
From Publishers Weekly Von Arnim (1866-1941), whose novel, The Enchanted April , was recently made into a film, offers stinging social commentary in this 1940 novel. Fanny Skeffington, divorced 22 years earlier and the veteran of many love affairs, is approaching her 50th birthday when she begins to have visions of her philandering ex-husband at the breakfast table. Upset, she visits an "eminent nerve-and-women's-diseases specialist" who angers her by implying that she is old. Fanny then begins a journey that leads her from one former lover to another, and they react to the aging Fanny with varying degrees of dismay. When she visits one man in the country, his simple young wife flinches at her addressing both of them as "darling." She attends a Lent service given by a clergyman who once adored her and finds that he has taken vows of poverty and pities her. Eventually, odd circumstances reunite her with her ex-husband. Although Fanny's superficial observations are often comically ironic--she muses that lovers "set so high a standard for one when first they fell in love that the exertion of keeping up to it wore one out"--there is a lightweight feel to this story of aging ungracefully. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Among Von Arnim's novels is The Enchanted April , now a beautifully realized feature film. A popular literary figure of her day, Von Arnim wrote books that display consummate skill and great sensitivity in the creation of female characters who generally exhibit the lofty desires motivating their behavior along with their far less appealing foibles. The protagonist here, Lady Fanny Skeffington, is approaching 50 and must acknowledge her faded beauty and the sudden absence of admirers in her once charmed life. Like Doris Lessing's novel The Summer before the Dark , this exquisitely crafted tale explores the state of mind of a middle-aged woman, who, after suffering an illness, must come to terms with her new persona, that of a woman no longer singled out as an object of the male gaze. Von Arnim, who died in 1941, was a prolific novelist and one destined to be rediscovered by readers wishing to savor her enthralling fiction. Alice Joyce
Features & Highlights
- Examines the plight of Lady Fanny Skeffington, who, after suffering an illness and approaching 50, must come to terms with her faded beauty and the absence of male admirers
