Christine
1917
Christine is an epistolary novel that opens with a wound. The reader knows from the start that the girl writing these letters is already dead, that her mother is gathering the last communications from a daughter who will never come home. Christine Cholmondeley, young and English, has traveled to Berlin to study music, and from May to August 1914 she writes to her mother with a freshness that aches: excitement about her lessons, loneliness in a foreign city, disdain for the Germans who undervalue her, longing for home. Then the political temperature rises. War approaches. Christine flees towards neutral Switzerland, but pneumonia strikes in Stuttgart, and she dies before she can reach her mother. Written during the war but set in that last innocent summer, the novel carries a terrible weight of knowing. What makes it endure is not history but intimacy: a mother-daughter relationship revealed entirely through letters, and the way one young woman's voice, bright and vulnerable, becomes a memorial.
Editions
X-Ray
“How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again”
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
“There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk”
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
“How is it that you should feel so vastly superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness in yourself?””
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
“It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.””
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
“Oh, delight, delight to think one didn't die this time, that one isn't going to die this time after all, but is going to get better, going to live, going presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one....””
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
“When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out as far as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed in the mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come and look at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in the pleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find one who would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness in which we each of us live.””
— Elizabeth Von Arnim
