Dear Elizabeth von Armin: I know you are dead, but I want to let you know that I really like your books. Even though your strong, independent female characters end up sort of compromising themselves in the end, they do it in such nice, happy, and probably realistic ways.
Mr. Skeffington is a bit darker than
The Enchanted April, but also more mature, like
Persuasion versus
Pride and Prejudice. I especially like these passages:
When the host is annoyed, and the hostess upset, and the hostess’ mother suspicious, and the hostess’ father an autobiographer, it is time for a guest to go.
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Oh, so boring; oh, so senseless. Should she go in for good works? Or attend lectures? Or learn languages? Or interest herself in the European situation? Bleak, bleak. But wasn’t the alternative even more bleak, indeed grisly, to dribble idly into old age by slow stages of increasing depression and discontent, punctuated—what fun!—by things like rheumatism and being deaf?
