Elizabeth Von Arnim

Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (1905), by Elizabeth von Arnim (novel) Elizabeth Von Arnim

First published in 1905, Princess Priscilla's Fortnight was no doubt written as a true-to-life fairy tale for Von Arnim's children. It tells the story of Priscilla, a hugely popular German princess, who grows tired of her lavish and pampered life. Through the instruction of her mentor, Herr Fritzing, she learns there is a wide and varied world outside the castle walls and yearns to escape he Princess Priscilla of Lothen Kunitz finds court life stifling and runs away to England with the elderly court librarian. Her intention is to live a pure and simple life filled with good works. But life among ordinary people in an English village is not what she expects it to be... (Introduction by Tabithat) Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothen Kunitz was up to the age of twenty one a most promising young lady. She was not only poetic in appearance beyond the habit of princesses but she was also of graceful and appropriate behaviour. She did what she was told; or, more valuable, she did what was expected of her without being told. Her father, in his youth and middle age a fiery man, now an irritable old gentleman who liked good food and insisted on strictest etiquette, was proud of her on those occasions when she happened to cross his mind. Her mother, by birth an English princess of an originality uncomfortable and unexpected in a royal lady that continued to the end of her life to crop up at disconcerting moments, died when Priscilla was sixteen