The Enchanted April

The Enchanted April is Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel about four Englishwomen who rent an Italian castle to escape their gray London lives.

It starts with a newspaper advertisement: a small medieval castle on the Italian coast, available to let for the month of April, wisteria included. Mrs. Lotty Wilkins spots it on a rainy afternoon and, on impulse, asks a woman she barely knows from her church, Mrs. Rose Arbuthnot, to split the cost with her. Neither can quite afford it alone, so they take on two more strangers to share the rent: Mrs. Fisher, an elderly widow who prefers the dead poets of her youth to the living people around her, and Lady Caroline Dester, a beautiful young woman worn out by being wanted by everyone.

The four women have nothing in common and little to say to each other on the journey south. But the castle, called San Salvatore, works on them slowly. Sunshine on old stone, the smell of the sea, and a garden full of flowers begin to loosen something in each of them. Marriages that had gone quiet are looked at again. Old griefs soften. By the time husbands and other guests start turning up at the castle door, the women who arrived as strangers are no longer quite the same people.

This is a gentle comedy of manners about renewal, unlikely friendship, and the strange effect a beautiful place can have on tired hearts. It has the wry humor and close attention to marriage and character that readers of E.M. Forster or Jane Austen tend to love, along with the simple pleasure of an escape-to-Italy story where nothing more dramatic than a change of heart is at stake.

The reading suits the story's own unhurried pace. Let the warmth of the Italian spring and the slow unfolding of these four lives carry you gently down.