Elizabeth of the German Garden

De Charms, Leslie. Elizabeth of the German Garden. I've already written entries on this biography here and here. I've googled Leslie de Charms, to whom Elizabeth left all of her papers and journals, and have come up with very little. My curiosity about de Charms was partly because of the protective attitude of the biography, partly because a Mrs. de Charms was Elizabeth's father's sister and I suspected that Leslie was a family relation, and partly because I wanted more information about the person Elizabeth trusted with all of her journals and letters.

I found this Inventory of the Mary Annette Russell, Countess, Papers, 1896-1941.
(Mary Annette Beauchamp became Von Arnim then Countess Russell, but was always, in her writing, Elizabeth.)

Under the Biography section of the above site: "[For further information see Leslie de Charms' Elizabeth of the German Garden, 1958; this biography was written by her daughter, Elizabeth (von Arnim) Butterworth]"

So it appears that Elizabeth left her papers to her beloved Liebet, Mrs. Corwin Butterworth, who wrote the biography under the pseudonym of Leslie de Charms. Am I correct in this assumption?

While I think the author (De Charms? Liebet?) did a fair job of presenting events fairly, I did think she seemed protective of Elizabeth and was frustrated that she mentioned several passionate letters from Mark Rainey and Francis Russell that she "couldn't" include. :) If she hadn't mentioned that she couldn't include them, I would have been just fine.

Moving on...

Elizabeth recognized the threat from Hitler much earlier than most. Her own experiences in Germany, her anger at the Germans because of WWI, and the fact that her daughter Trix was married to a German only increased her dread.

From a letter to Liebet in May of 1932: "...I utterly agree with your remarks about the way we don't take the trouble to learn a few politics and just let them slide along unchecked to catastrophe...we should be more intelligently interested, and as a beginning I'm reading everything I can lay my hands on about the crisis...They'll (the Germans) drag us all to hell and themselves too..."

She is frustrated with people's blindness to the threat, but her worries increase as her daughter becomes more and more fearful and must prove her ethnic purity. Yet between her personal problems and disappointments, her frequent illnesses and her increasing age, and her fears of war, Elizabeth continues to bounce back. Finally, in May of 1939, Elizabeth boards the Queen Mary for America. She died in Charleston on February 9, 1941; Lieb was with her.

Elizabeth's reading was wide and deep, and she recorded-- in both letters and journals-- what she was reading and how she felt about it. She had a great fondness for D.H. Lawrence, but didn't like Rebecca West's novels. When she met West, she was surprised at how much she liked her personally (West had reviewed many of Elizabeth's own novels and not altogether favorably). Reading Elizabeth's assessments of her reading (including her own novels, often critically) was one of the aspects I most enjoyed.

I'm so glad Melanie suggested this biography; it was a pleasure to spend time with Elizabeth.

Wickipedia article.

Nonfiction. Biography. 1958. 424 pages.