Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von ArnimMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
"It is the kind of book you must go on reading - angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it till you've reach the last word... it has burned itself into your soul."
I am stunned. I read this book while on vacation, never thinking it would burn this much, affect me so; I did not expect to fall so deeply in love with a literary character, perhaps even more than I love Jo March, Sara Crewe, Anne of Green Gables, and Laura Ingalls Wilder! The pages of my copy have so many underlined passages, perhaps ten times the normal amount in other books! It looks like it has gone through a censor in wartime!
This is a textbook case of the cover not conveying the entirety of this wonderful book, now one of my favorites of all time! The cover art is gorgeous, to be sure, but screams "romance," or "chick lit." The book is neither! Not that there's anything wrong with either, but this von Arnim again defies quick genre labels as it goes against the stereotype and refuses categorization apart from the wholehearted "good read" label. Nay, it is not merely good, it makes its reader better for having read it. And books that do so are few and far in between!
"I deliberately consider my life glorious. And when will you see that there are kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured in money or position?"
Fräulein Schmidt is who I aspire to be. She is all of my feminist heroes of childhood, but stronger, braver... complete and whole unto herself. Damning the world and its prejudices and prejudiced people, she is one who sets out to forge her own happiness, who gives no one the power to make her feel small.
A few modern readers might criticize her character for "toxic positivity" that brooks no patience for souls of a more tender bent, who feel unhappier than most. But I think we could all learn a thing or two from someone who has suffered much, but whose spirit remains indomitable. Like so many of us in 2022, our heroine goes through many kinds of death... whether a physical family member or that of many relationships. And yet she smiles. And yet she laughs. And writes to exhort one young man in particular to do the same.
"But do you suppose that, having given you all this, I am going to give you my soul as well? To moan my life away, my beautiful life? You are not worth it... My life shall be splendid in spite of you. You shall not cheat me of one single chance of heaven."
The book is written in the form of many letters from our German fräulein to a young Englishman of far more noble birth than she. Poor but joyful, rich in books and spirit, she captured this reader's heart from page one!
"People are born in one of three classes: children of light, children of twilight, children of night... Bother the gloomy. They are an ungrateful set. If they can they will turn the whole world sour, and sap up all the happiness of the children of light without giving out any shining in return... the twilight children can by diligence come out of the dusk into a greater brightness. Only, they must come out by themselves... And don't you know - oh, have you forgotten? - that the Kingdom of God is within you? There is no help, except what you dig out of your own self."
Have a wonderful Christmas, everyone, and like Fräulein Schmidt, may we all, like her, "be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic."
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