The Pastor's Wife

What It's About

Ingeborg is a bishop's daughter, quietly bound to her father's household and parish duties. After a tooth extraction in London she feels a sudden, almost giddy sense of freedom, and on impulse she joins an excursion to Switzerland. There she meets Herr Dremmel, a German pastor. Their conversations about life, duty and love lead to a proposal, and the novel follows what that choice means for a woman who has only just discovered what she wants from life.

Key Concepts

The novel is a satire of marriage, clerical respectability and the limited choices open to women of the period. It sets freedom, even a small and sudden taste of it, against conventional duty. Von Arnim's tone is ironic and comic, and it is often barbed. Her treatment of marriage and motherhood is frank, and the book draws on her own experience of life as a German aristocrat's wife.

About the Author

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, was a British novelist. She grew up in England and became a countess through her first marriage to a Prussian nobleman. She published under the name "Elizabeth", and was a cousin of the writer Katherine Mansfield. She later lived in Switzerland and the United States, where she died.