Mrs. Fisher

In the 1922 novel, four women of various ages flee to Italy to escape the English climate.

     

     For the past three years or so, I've resembled Mrs. Fisher in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April. As the story begins, Mrs. Fisher seems a rather dis-agreeable old woman. von Arnim wrote of her:
Her father had been an eminent critic and in his house she had seem practically everybody who was anybody in letters or art. Carlyle had scowled at her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pigtail. My father's friends sometimes seem to me more alive than my contemporaries.
     At first Mrs. Fisher studiously finds nothing in her present circumstances to live up to her memory of those distinguished dead white males. I don't go to that extreme, but it has seemed to me that Croswell Bowen knew an awful lot of very colorful characters, including some distinguished artists and writers. Was it simply that Greenwich Village in the 1930s was overflowing with talent? Or was it his gregarious personality, cranked up for social occasions, that made for so many interesting encounters?  Perhaps I live in a world where the concentration of intellectual energy is far less than it was then or in post-War Manhattan.  Or maybe these people are fascinating because I am beholding them from a distance, anchored in a time I'm just learning to understand.
     Mrs. Fisher has no desire to produce. No new criticism or essays or poetry will come from her. She only asked, she said, to be allowed to sit quiet in the sun and remember. Eventually, she does grow out of her passivity, and becomes mentally and emotionally much younger, more responsive and feeling. I do want to produce in these post-middle age years. I'm hoping for a sort of Picasso or Matisse like run-up to the end. Take that Mrs. Fisher!