The Enchanted April

The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth von Arnim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a lovely novel, written in 1921, about four English women figuring out how to be happy. Most of the story is internal to the four main characters with a few sections from other points of view. Each woman has issues that are preventing her from being happy, most of them because of how they are choosing to respond to the world around them. A month in a beautiful villa in San Salvatore, Italy gives them each an opportunity to consider their lives and what changes they might make to improve them.

"...go home just as usual and see about the dinner and the fish just as we've been doing for years and years and will go on doing for years and years. ...I see no end to it. There is no end to it. So that there ought to be a break, there ought to be intervals--in everybody's interests. Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.You see, after a bit everybody needs a holiday." (p. 12-13)

This is one of my Classics Club titles and counts toward the Back to the Classics Challenge as a "classic by a woman author."