The Caravaners – Elizabeth von Arnim (1909)

With thanks to Handheld press for providing me with a beautiful copy of the new edition.

Elizabeth von Arnim wrote The Caravaners in 1907, following a similar type of holiday. She, her teenage daughters (her husband elected to stay at home) her niece, a family friend and her daughters’ tutors (E M Forster, Hugh Walpole and Charles Erskine Stuart) spent August of that year touring the English countryside of Sussex and Kent in caravans. It was one of the wettest summers on record. Personally, I find the idea of that group, touring together utterly fascinating. This novel is of course a highly fictionalised version, in The Caravaners, von Arnim plays with some recognisable types – a German army officer, the Englishwoman and the English Gentleman, the young clergyman, the flapper. Her observations are simply wonderful and her satire at its best. The only reason The Caravaners won’t be my favourite Elizabeth von Arnim novel is because the presence of Baron Otto van Ottringel began to get on my nerves.

The Caravaners is the only one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s novels to be narrated by a male character – he is quite reminiscent of the husband in Vera – though to my mind less dark, and more ridiculous. As the novel opens it becomes clear that Otto is writing a reminiscence of his English caravanning holiday, with which he plans to delight and entertain his after dinner listeners in his small hometown. Otto; is a Prussian army officer – a proud, pompous, traditional man. He and his wife Edelgard join a group of Anglo-German travellers, to caravan through the English countryside. The holiday; is in recognition of his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary – only he has only been married to the much younger Edelgard for six years, but he feels he should be able to add that to the nineteen years he spent with his first wife. One wife being much the same as another. In that alone, we see the man Otto is. He does of course have a fairly fixed idea of what a wife should be.

“Indeed, the perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we wish, for a change, to tell her about our own thoughts, and that she should be at hand when we want anything. Surely this is not much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak, on every table, and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays, and combines being useful with being dumb.’”

Otto and Edelgard’s fellow travellers, are two German sisters; Mrs Menzies-Legh, and her wealthy English husband, her younger, beautiful sister the widowed Frau von Eckthum, two young Englishmen, Mrs Menzies-Legh’s niece and her friend. The stage is set for a wonderful comedy of manners, narrated by one of the most infuriating narrators in fiction. Elizabeth von Arim is immensely clever here – because she allows her readers to develop a view and an understanding of Otto, that he certainly doesn’t have of himself.

From the moment the couple arrive in England Otto seems to be on the backfoot – nothing is ever quite to his liking – either that or things aren’t done quite as they would be in Germany. He rather likes to look down upon the habits of the English and find fault with everything. When the couple join their touring group they are introduced to the Elsa, the Ailsa, and the Ilsa; the three horse-drawn caravans. While, Edelgard exclaims in delight over the tiny cups hanging on hooks, Otto is more concerned with his stomach.

It isn’t long before Otto notices subtle changes in his wife – as she discovers some new freedoms, becoming emancipated under the influence of her companions, all this, needless to say to the Baron’s absolute horror. He notices how one of the young men – Jellaby (who the Baron despises) seems very friendly toward his wife, and so the Baron plots how he can bring up her age as being close to thirty into the conversation – thus, he believes putting him off. He is really quite horrible to his poor wife – he shows no affection, and reprimands her like a child over the most ridiculous things, he of course is always right.

“Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem. It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood. She knew this, and used to be careful to try to keep proper pace, if I may so express it, with my love…”

Edelgard gets on with everyone well, they all clearly feel for her being saddled with such a husband – but the Baron is completely unaware of his effect on everyone around him. Instead he becomes a little smitten with Frau von Eckthum. There is so much comedy here – the Baron shamed into performing menial tasks which he sees as being beneath him, problems with horses, mud, cultural differences galore. Elizbeth von Arnim has an eye for such absurdities and reproduces them gloriously.

Among the satire and many genuinely laugh out loud moments, Elizabeth von Arnim had quite a lot to say about bad, abusive marriages and the subjugation of women. It’s a familiar theme for her, and one she explores with her customary wit and intelligence.

(Handheld publish this edition of The Caravaners on 16th September 2019 with an introduction by Juliane Römhld)