Books : The Pastor's Wife

Rating: - Comic but chilling underrated Edwardian masterpiece
When Ingeborg Bullivant, dutiful daughter of the overbearing Bishop of Redchester, finds herself surprisingly at liberty in London with seven guineas to spend after some dental work proves to be more straightforward than expected, an audacious idea enters her head: to spend the money on a 'Dent's Excursion' to the Continent. This act of rebellion proves to be straightforward enough to carry out - but turns out to have unforeseen consequences, with Ingeborg ending up the wife of a pastor in an isolated German village.

In this stunning novel, first published in 1914, Elizabeth von Arnim describes Ingeborg's adventures: her naive, optimistic and ever dutiful attempts to make a success of her new life and subsequent dramatic 'elopement' to Italy.

Like all von Arnim's novels, the strongest theme of the book is the helplessness of women in a world where men have the power, and it is this that gives the book its devastatingly macabre undertones, as we see the helpless Ingeborg attempting to make sense of situations she does not understand. Von Armin's view of human motivation is a distinctive one, strangely passive and yet wholly convincing, as we see how actions are governed by everything from religious belief to the euphoria at being finally free from the toothache.

It is this incongruity that provides some of the humour of the novel. But von Arnim's characters are also richly comic: the pompous pastor, obsessed with his scientific studies into manure and pigs, the affected, egotistical artist (reputedly partly based on von Arnim's lover H.G.Wells), and of course the villagers Ingeborg encounters. Culture clashes, and Ingeborg's bewilderment at the rigid but never explained customs of her new neighbours, lead to some deliciously humorous scenes, always described with a perceptiveness and lightness of touch which make them truly memorable.

In the end it is the book's ability to be as genuinely funny as it is macabre that makes it stand out as a masterpiece; the final scene in the book is one which will raise the hairs on the back of the reader's neck and make it live on in the memory a long time.