She married a gaslighting bigamist, then wrote a best-selling novel

It was a motto by which she lived. So too did the heroines of her 21 books. They were women on the run – from gilded cages, tyrannical or dull husbands, and from the relentless demands of motherhood.

Von Arnim was an erratic mother. She had a great sense of fun, ready to take her children on winter sleigh rides and summer picnics. But she was often absent, travelling abroad or writing in her summer house from which her children – and everyone else – were excluded.

Widowed in her forties, she was left with five children to support and only her writing to rely on. Fiercely determined, independent and hard-working, she wrote one international best-seller after another. She was so successful she built herself a 16-bedroom chalet in Switzerland and kept a well-positioned flat in central London.

On the cusp of 50, she remarried. Her second husband was an English aristocrat, the brother of philosopher Bertrand Russell. But Frank Russell, dubbed the Wicked Earl, was a bully and a convicted bigamist.

She could not have been oblivious to Frank’s turbulent marital history. She soon found herself subject to his volcanic tempers and psychological manipulation.

“I’m practically in prison. Within the limits of the wire fencing I can go & come if I have first asked if I may go for a walk, but to get outside it means almost every time bad blood,” she wrote to one of her daughters.

After three years, she found the courage to flee. Her disastrous second marriage provided the raw material for her darkly gothic masterpiece Vera. The novel centres on a young woman courted by an ebullient man who transforms into a tyrant after they marry.

Women still wrestle with many of the questions von Arnim confronted: how to balance the competing demands of family and responsibilities with the desire to lead a creative, independent life; how to resist being crushed by the weight of society’s expectations and judgments.

With its insight into intimate abuse, the 1921 novel is an unnerving portrayal of what today we call gaslighting and coercive control. At a time when male behaviour and domestic abuse is under the spotlight, it’s a novel with renewed currency.

Von Arnim resolved never to marry again, but she did not give up on love or romance. She spent the Roaring Twenties with a handsome lover almost 30 years her junior. And she satirised the double standards by which sexually active older women – but not men – are so harshly judged. Double standards that have changed little in the century since.

Women still wrestle with many of the questions von Arnim confronted in her novels and unconventional life: how to balance the competing demands of family and responsibilities with the desire to lead a creative, independent life; how to resist being crushed by the weight of society’s expectations and judgments.

Joyce Morgan is the author of The Countess from Kirribilli: The mysterious and free-
spirited literary sensation who beguiled the world. (Allen & Unwin)

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