Love

Another one of those "found gems" i.e. found in my apartment, Love is a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, a cousin and contemporary of Katherine Mansfield.

Very Mansfield-esque for fans of her work (though von Arnim was also quite popular and widely read in her lifetime as well), the novel is about a woman and a man who share a love of The Immortal Hour, having seen the play nine times and thirty-six times, respectively. They fall in love despite social norms: she is forty-seven, he twenty-five. She is also the mother of a married woman (only nineteen, but still), and a soon-to-be grandmother.

But this love reaches across boundaries and social norms. Christopher loves Catherine determinedly, and she becomes enveloped in his love, just by the act of his loving her. Although during their courtship (one could say stalking on Christopher's part), Catherine think he is just a silly little boy, until she goes to visit her daughter (actually to escape Christopher). Once there, she realizes that her daughter and new son-in-law - actually older than Catherine at forty-nine - who are seemingly full of love, have no room for her. And his mother is a buzzard who makes things practically impossible for Catherine.

She basically goes running back into Christopher's arms.

However, since there is such talk among their acquaintances once they marry, Catherine feels she has to keep up with Christopher age-wise and invests in expensive hair and facial treatments to make her look younger. Ultimately, she looks haggard and decrepit without them, to Christopher's horror. He had never before noticed how much older she was than he, when she left well enough alone.

Actually, according to the afterward, the novel was based on an affair von Arnim had with a much younger man, Michael Frere. When they met in 1920, she was fifty-four and he twenty-four. Their affair was torrid, and though they did not last long as lovers, she helped him to hone his writing abilities and got him published for the first time. She also got an experimental and terribly unfortunate face life in the 1920s to "keep up" with Frere, just as Catherine does for Christopher.

I really enjoyed the book, I think because it appealed to my secret sentimental side but also discussed the idea of blindly accepting social standards as if they were God's will, and put in a good word about double standards in the context of "social norms."

Although the ending is tragic, and leaves the fate of its characters in an ambivalent state - definitely the last thing I wanted, actually, when I got into it and thought, "Oh, goody. A light and fluffy and fun romance." And then I read the forward to realize Elizabeth von Arnim was related to Katherine Mansfield.

All in all, an excellent read. My college professors would all pat me on the back for picking a real and literary novel over what I could have chosen (among them a murder mystery set in Vienna). And for reading the forward AND afterward. *Pats self on back.*