Karen Usborne
Author of Elizabeth: The Author of "Elizabeth and Her Garden"
Works by Karen Usborne
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1941
- Gender
- female
- Birthplace
- USA
- Relationships
- Usborne, Richard (father)
Members
Reviews
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 1
- Members
- 19
- Popularity
- #609,294
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 4
- Languages
- 1
Elizabeth was born Mary Anne Beauchamp before marrying a German count fifteen years her senior. After the publication of her first novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden in 1898, she was known as Elizabeth to her readers and, eventually, to her family and friends too. Sadly, Elizabeth's first marriage to the German count, and her second marriage to an English earl were not happy ones. She seemed to love her children dearly but also adopted the upper class practice of sending them away from home to relatives or boarding schools if they became 'troublesome' which seems to have created a lot of tensions between them in later years. She had several affairs and was friends with many other literary types from the beginning of the twentieth century including H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw and Katherine Mansfield. She seemed to alternate between periods of almost complete seclusion and periods of intense socializing, But, as Usborne puts it, she could never be truly happy in one state without longing for the other:
"...there was a fundamental inconsistency in her highly complex personality. She could never enjoy the purely frivolous, gay and apparently superficial life she always lived when she was in London without hankering for a lonely cottage somewhere where she would be able to work in solitude and meditate. But once in the solitary reality of that state she yearned for stimulating company and the flattering attention of her friends.The grass was invariably emereld green on the other side of the fence."
Usborne also includes an analysis of each of Elizabeth's novels as well as her memoirs, All the Dogs of My Life. I'd already known that her first two novels, Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer were autobiographical but I hadn't realised there was a strong autobiographical element to all her novels and I found it really interesting to learn which areas of her life each one drew on.
One of the reasons I wanted to read a biography of Elizabeth was because I was fascinated by the idea that Elizabeth von Arnim wrote The Ordeal of Elizabeth which I read and reviewed back in March. The Ordeal of Elizabeth is set in and around New York City and I hadn't been aware that Elizabeth von Arnim had lived in that part of the workd. Having finished the biography it seems unlikely that Elizabeth von Arnim did write this novel (and wikipedia and Project Gitenberg have since removed this book fromt the list of works attributed to her). There's no mention of The Ordeal of Elizabeth in Usborne's biography which, given the variety of sources Usborne used, seems an unlikely oversight if Elizabeth von Arnim did write it. It's set in a country Elizabeth von Arnim had never visited at that stage of her life, most of Elizabeth von Arnim's novels were autobiographical in some way and she had another book published in the same year, The Benefactress. All of which makes me think it's very unlikely that she did write this novel.… (more)