During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales surged of The Enchanted April, the popular 1922 novel about English tourists in Italy. So one learns from The Countess from Kirribilli, the vibrant new biography of The Enchanted April's author, Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield's cousin and friend. Why this novel during the pandemic? Was it because it is a book about feeling housebound and wanting to travel, or because it is a book about being ill? Because it is both, and thus apt for these times. How are its characters ill? They grieve losses, they suffer depression, they feel frustrated, they are bored. These are common illnesses, and modernist literature more often than not offers readers companionship in such states, and even guidance. It may not hurt to remind ourselves that suffering is neither a virtue nor a necessity. The books under review provide many angles on how to alleviate it: on various sorts of recuperation in Mansfield's life, work and orbit.

Elizabeth von Arnim has found the right biographer in Joyce Morgan, whose lively account of Elizabeth's peripatetic, energetic life is extremely good company. (I will follow Morgan's lead in referring to the author by her chosen first name; she was born Mary Beauchamp in Sydney, and chose for her pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, the aristocratic surname a product of her marriage to Prussian landed gentry and of her life in Pomerania.) Morgan's biography is true to her subject, who was remembered as ‘enchanting company’ by the writer Frank Swinnerton; ‘What a devil she was, but what good company!’ exclaimed the novelist Gladys B. Stern in a letter to fellow author Hugh Walpole after Elizabeth's death (p. 304). Morgan too has found her so; as she writes in her ‘Acknowledgements’, she spent two months immersed in the Huntington Library's archive of Elizabeth's papers, and found there ‘the feeling of intimacy’ as she read handwriting that became ‘as familiar as the sound of a friend's voice’ (p. 314). Morgan is a virtuoso when it comes to bringing that feeling of intimacy and friendship into her own writing of Elizabeth's story: she brings Elizabeth to life on the page, charming the reader throughout with a sharp, selective eye for detail and anecdote that refrains from overwhelming us with minutiae, biography's biggest drawback as a genre.