Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins had not thought of references, and they had not dreamed a rent could be so high. In their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week; or less, seeing that the place was small and old.
I’m of the age where I saw and really enjoyed the 1991 film Enchanted April, based on this book and starring inter alia Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Michael Kitchen and Jim Broadbent, and when I spotted the novel second hand a few months back I snapped it up. As I had hoped, it’s a warm story about four women who come together on holiday in Italy in 1922, and gradually become friends with each other, with the two who are married also rekindling their relationships with their husbands. It’s not super radical, more a comedy of manners, but I found it very entertaining, mainly for the emotional disentanglements but also for the lyrical descriptions of Italy. You can get The Enchanted April here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next up there is H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald.
I disqualified only three books this time – Eat, Pray Love (as previously discussed under India and Indonesia, less than half of it is set in Italy), and Dante’s Inferno and Divine Comedy, tallied separately, which are set not in Italy but in the afterlife.
I’m allowing The Prince, however, because the great majority of the historical examples given are Italian. I’m also allowing A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway is doing well in these lists) because although some of the action is in Switzerland, and some in today’s Slovenia, I think the majority of the book is set within Italy’s current borders – the town of Gorizia is on the Italian side of the river Isonzo, even if most of the battles were on the other side.
When I first did this exercise in 2015, Angels and Demons was the runaway winner, so I’m delighted that a surge of Shakespeare fans on LibraryThing has now pushed it into second place. Romeo and Juliet is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays anyway. I know that is not a widely held view, and I’m also aware that a play supposedly set in Verona somehow manages to avoid mention of the whacking huge landmark which defines the city, but I’d rather have it at the top than Dan Brown.
I did not realise that Dan Brown has written another terrible book set in Italy as well, also called Inferno.
Sources differ as to whether Myanmar or Kenya is next in the list of countries by population, but they agree that Colombia and South Korea are both close behind. I will take them in that order, I think.
