“A witty tale about…finding liberation from a stifling world of elitism through gardening. It was a risky tale for its time, and still feels modern on both love and the garden.” —The Guardian “The book was a wild success and by 1899 it had run through twenty-one editions.” —The Independent Elizabeth von Arnim’s vivid, humorous, and subtly subversive Elizabeth and her German Garden is one of the great garden memoirs of all time. As the wife of a stern German aristocrat and mother of young children, the irreverent narrator of this engrossing memoir escapes the societal norms and constrictions of late nineteenth-century patriarchy by becoming an enthusiastic amateur gardener. As she grapples with the expectations placed on her as a woman, wife, and mother, Elizabeth’s joyfully valiant commitment to gardening transcends the task at hand and affords her a level of independence that has inspired generations of devoted readers. ELIZABETH VON ARNIM (1866–1941) was an Australian-born writer who spent her life in Great Britain and Europe, where she married a German count, raised five children, had a relationship with H. G. Wells, and published more than twenty enormously successful books. The cousin of Katherine Mansfield, von Arnim was a member of a literary circle that included Hugh Walpole, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, and others. ULRICH BAER is University Professor at New York University, a graduate of Harvard and Yale, and the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. He has published widely on poetry, fiction, photography, and written new introductions to many classic books. "A witty tale about...finding liberation from a stifling world of elitism through gardening. It was a risky tale for its time, and still feels modern on both love and the garden." -The Guardian "The book was a wild success and by 1899 it had run through twenty-one editions." -The Independent ELIZABETH VON ARNIM (1866-1941) was an Australian-born writer who spent her life in Great Britain and Europe, where she married a German count, raised five children, had a relationship with H. G. Wells, and published more than twenty enormously successful books. The cousin of Katherine Mansfield, von Arnim was a member of a literary circle that included Hugh Walpole, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, and others.