The Pastor's Wife
1914
A tooth extraction becomes the unlikely catalyst for liberation in this sparkling early feminist novel. Ingeborg, dutiful daughter of a bishop, has spent her life as her father's assistant, her existence narrow and constrained by expectation. But fresh from the dentist's chair, anaesthetic still humming through her veins, she experiences a sudden, startling awareness of her own hunger for life. The world crackles with possibility. She escapes to London, and from there, on a whim, to Switzerland, where adventure and Herr Dremmel await. What follows is a witty, incisive exploration of what it means to choose oneself when society has decreed you exist only to serve others. Von Arnim, whose Enchanted April continues to enchant readers, deploys her signature wit to examine the collision between desire and duty, between who a woman is and who she's told to be. The romance that blossoms is both seductive and unsettling, raising questions about whether freedom and love can truly coexist within the structures men have built.
