Katherine mansfield

Exploring the enchanted gardens of literature

‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created. Both Elizabeths lived in Nassenheide in Pomerania (now Rzedziny, Poland), but whereas the fictional one had a spectacular garden, with a majestic clematis ‘Jackmanii’, giant poppies and delphiniums, the real Elizabeth, according to E.M. Forster (who was briefly employed as a tutor to the von Arnim children), did not have much of a garden at

A reappraisal of James Courage

James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more or less slipped from view. None of the eight novels he published between 1933 and 1961 is in print and most of them are impossible to find secondhand. The same goes for a collection of his short stories published in 1973. He is chiefly remembered for A Way of Love, a bold novel about a homosexual relationship that was published in 1959 and became a minor cause célèbre in New Zealand when it was banned there. Courage was born in New Zealand in 1903, but came to Oxford University in