The Benefactress

[von Arnim, Elizabeth]

The third novel by 'Elizabeth', aka Mary Beauchamp, born in Kirribilli in 1866, author of twenty-one best-selling novels, 'The Enchanted April her best-known', regularly compared to Jane Austen for her talent and wit, through marriage, a member of the German nobility, a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield, living much of her life in Switzerland, and inviting decades of international speculation about her identity.
'The Benefactress' features Anna Eastcourt, 'an exceedingly pretty girl' who 'wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule are restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain.'