Elizabeth von Arnim

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) Australian writer and best known for Elizabeth and her German Garden. (1898)

Elizabeth von Arnim (née Mary Annette Beauchamp, `May’) was born 31 August 1866 at Kiribili Point, Sydney, Australia. Her father was Henry Herron Beauchamp (1825–1907), merchant and her mother Elizabeth (Louey) Weiss Lassetter (1836–1919). Arnim had four brothers, a sister and an adopted cousin from New Zealand, Kathleen Beauchamp, who would later marry John Middleton Murray and write under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. 

In 1871 the Beauchamps left Australia to live in Switzerland for a time before settling in England. Arnim attended the Blythwood House School in London, then Queen's College School in Horn Lane, Acton in 1881. The Arnim household was a happy one, though somewhat disrupted by their various household moves and so many children. The shy and blonde young May turned into a voracious reader and she took organ lessons from the Royal College of Music. In 1889 she travelled abroad to Rome with her father when she met a German nobleman, Count Henning August von Arnim (1851–1910). Two years later they married in London at St. Stephen's, Kensington, 21 February 1891. Arnim would later refer to her domineering husband as the 'Man of Wrath'. The Arnims moved to Berlin where they would have four daughters and one son.