REVIEW
Bother the gloomy Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim By Gabrielle Carey Review by Jenny Bird
Only Happiness Here is a hybrid work of non-fiction, both biography and memoir, and a layered reflection on the nature of happiness. Gabrielle Carey’s fascination with the life and works of the writer Elizabeth von Arnim is both literary and personal. Carey, an academic, declares that rather than write a conventional biography, she wants to share her ‘love of Elizabeth and her works with readers outside of the scholarly world.’ She describes her relationship with Elizabeth as ‘like a very special friend that I was aching to introduce to everyone I knew.’ Carey is ‘incensed’ that Australian-born Elizabeth ‘had been so completely forgotten’ and determines to return her to her rightful place in literary history. But Carey’s interest in Elizabeth von Arnim lies deeper than just a biographer’s sense of injustice for an overlooked and forgotten subject. Already committed to writing a book about Elizabeth, Carey’s family was struck by tragedy, and, with life and work on hold, Carey found that she had forgotten what happiness was. Worse than that, she felt that she had ‘completely lost faith in the very idea of happiness, let alone the pursuit of it.’ Carey writes, ‘When I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, I found, for the first time, a writer who wrote about being happy.’ Carey’s questions became these: ‘What did Elizabeth understand about happiness that no other writer I’ve ever come across did? And is it something I too might be able to learn?’ She takes a year off to study Elizabeth, a year that she describes as ‘one of the happiest in my life.’ In Only Happiness Here Carey toggles between Elizabeth’s personal diaries, her books, and three previously published biographies to fulfil her promise of sharing her special friend with us. I too fell in love with Elizabeth and laughed out loud at her wickedly 20 | WINTER 2021 northerly
satirical writing about marriage and the gendered roles of domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century: She hadn’t been married a week before she was reflecting what a bad arrangement it was, the way ecstasy seemed to have no staying power. Also it oughtn’t to begin, she considered, at its topmost height and accordingly not be able to move except downwards. If one could only start modestly in marriage with very little of it and work steadily upwards…’
And this observation from an agriculturalist husband: His affection for his wife was quite satisfactory: it was calm, it was deep, it interfered with nothing. She held the honourable position he had always, even at his most enamoured moment, known she would ultimately fill, the position next best in his life after the fertilizers.
You can be forgiven for never having heard of Elizabeth von Arnim. Born in Sydney in 1866, her family moved to London in 1870. She lived ‘a manically restless life’ in Europe, England and the USA, never returning to Australia. She was a friend of E.M. Foster, a lover of H.G. Wells, the wife of Count Henning August von ArnimSchlagenthin and later the wife of Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank. She was the mother of five children and the cousin of Katherine Mansfield. Throughout a life of chaotic and often destructive domestic, financial and romantic dramas, she was a determined, consistent and prolific writer. Most of her twenty-one books are thinly disguised semi-autobiographies. When Elizabeth died in 1941 the Melbourne Advocate said this about her writing: ‘Wit, glamour, joyousness, truth (sometimes ugly), incisive satire, laughter, beauty, common sense…’ Amidst the chaos and periods of deep depression,
