Enchanted April

The novel "The Enchanted April" by Elisabeth von Arnim (1886–1941) immediately gained reader interest upon its publication (1926) and became a true bestseller for almost a century. What is this work about, thanks to the atmosphere of which the Italian resort of Portofino quickly turned into a place of tourist pilgrimage?

It would seem that the plot is quite trivial: four women from different social classes - an inconspicuous, complexed housewife; a model of virtue, the pious wife of a writer of frivolous novels; an elderly, sullen intellectual, stuck in the past, and a beautiful aristocrat in search of solitude - unite in their desire to escape from the dank, depressive atmosphere of Foggy Albion to the Italian Riviera - a real paradise on earth with sun, sea and wisteria. However, despite the trivial plot line, the novel is by no means trivial, as we witness the immersion into the spiritual world of its characters and the unexpected metamorphoses that occur to them in captivity of the magical Italian April.