Love by Elizabeth von Arnim is the book which I got in this month’s Classics Club Spin. I’m quite late in getting around to writing about it, but you know what it’s like, sometimes life just gets in the way of what you really want to be doing!
I really enjoyed this book although it is quite a sad read because Elizabeth von Arnim was writing about her own experience of having a relationship with a much younger man, which ended badly. This book was first published in 1925.
Catherine was obsessed with a play called The Immortal Hour which has been playing at King’s Cross. She had seen it umpteen times and eventually she strikes up a friendship with Christopher who shares her obsession. Christopher had noticed Catherine long before she was aware of him. He was drawn to her petite figure and beauty and took her to be a young woman who didn’t have much money as she always wore the same clothes. He wasn’t to know that Catherine had a married daughter and she was only hard up because her late husband had been so afraid that if he died she would attract fortune hunters that he decided to leave everything to his daughter, and left his wife to struggle along on a very small annual allowance. It didn’t seem to occur to him that his daughter would eventually become heir to his large fortune and in turn would be the target of fortune hunters, particularly one local vicar!
By the time Christopher saw Catherine in the cruel light of day he was already in love with her and was just shocked at how tired she was looking. As you would expect Catherine is charmed when she realises that he thinks she is much younger than she is and her happiness means that people see only laughter lines, not the age wrinkles which are really there.
So begins a battle with gravity and time and Catherine ends up spending time and money on the artistry of a marvellous make-up woman to try to be worthy of her younger man.
When Catherine’s son-in-law, who is a clergyman, finds out about her friendship with Christopher he is absolutely appalled, but Catherine points out to him that her daughter is actually over 30 years younger than he is. Surely he should be the last person to complain about an age gap between a couple, but he doesn’t see it that way.
This novel is all about hypocrisy, what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, but somehow often isn’t. The relationship between Catherine’s daughter Virginia and her husband Stephen is really much worse as Stephen had dodged marriage over the years, much to his mother’s chagrin, but she wasn’t to know that her son had been eyeing up young Virginia since she was in short socks! Nowadays we would say he had been grooming her and he married her as soon as she turned 18, Catherine could have been bloody minded and made him wait until her daughter turned 21, hoping that by that time she had seen sense and wasn’t so enamoured by what she obviously saw as a father figure, something which she lacked due to her own father’s early death.
Well, I don’t know about you but I feel that when the age gap between a couple is so large that one of them is old enough to be the parent of the other, then it is distinctly weird, and the few such relationships which I’ve had experience of viewing from a distance have definitely been paternalistic/maternalistic. But I suppose if that’s what makes them happy then who am I to complain.
Mind you, although I never had a daughter I must admit that if I had had one then if a man old enough to be her father had come sniffing around after her – I would have beaten him off with a brush!
Another great read from Elizabeth von Arnim.
I really enjoyed this one too. Though it is sad, it isn’t as sharp as some of her other books – she seems to feel more for her characters, perhaps because it’s autobiographical? Except for Stephen, though – what a creep.
Lisa,
I agree, I just hope that she didn’t have experience of a Stephen type at any point in her life!
I’ve only read Enchanted April by her. Hadn’t heard of this one – it does sound rather sad.
I don’t know any couples very well with that much an age gap between them. One of my college professors did marry a former student who was only maybe five or six years older than his daughter from a previous marriage. He was my advisor and I was on friendly terms with the student when we were academic peers, but I didn’t know them as a couple as I had graduated and moved away by that time. I was shocked to hear the news, but I think that their personalities are complementary in a way that would prevent any destructive paternalism on his part. I’ve known women who have married younger men, but not as big an age gap. I can’t imagine being thirty years younger/older than my spouse.
Christy,
I suppose all relationships are different but I know of one woman who lays out her husband’s clothes for him, he doesn’t get a choice in the matter! He’s treated like a 3 year old but his wife is only a couple of years older than him. I think he enjoys not having any responsibilities at all – she’s the boss. The ones with big age gaps that I know of had lost a parent at a very early age and were obviously marrying someone who would have been the age of the dead parent – all a bit weird.