Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

The novel centres on Rose-Marie Schmidt, a twenty-five-year-old woman who lives with her father, a professor, and is considered a spinster by most of the inhabitants of their small German town. The story weaves in a romantic entanglement as Rose-Marie falls in love with a poor but high-born young Englishman, Roger Anstruther, who is a student of her father’s. After Roger professes his love for Rose-Marie, he returns to England, leaving her to write charming letters to her father’s former student. A delightful epistolary novel, ‘Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther’ will be enjoyed by fans of Jane Austen’s novel. Elizabeth von Arnim was an English novelist – a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield – born as Mary Annette Beauchamp in Australia in 1866. She married a German aristocrat and her earliest written works are set in Germany. Von Arnim launched her career as a writer with her satirical and semi-autobiographical work ‘Elizabeth and Her German Garden’, published anonymously in 1898. Although she was known by the name May in her early life, when she began writing, her success as ‘Elizabeth’ meant that her writings were ascribed to the name Elizabeth von Arnim.