Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Vera
    Unavailable
    Vera
    Unavailable
    Vera
    Ebook324 pages4 hours

    Vera

    By Elizabeth Von Arnim

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    A handsome stranger enters Lucy Entwhistle's life on the very day of her father's death. Everard Wemyss is mourning the recent loss of his wife, and he and Lucy are drawn together in their shared experience of grief. A remarkable bond forms between the despairing couple, the thought of separation proves intolerable, and they are quickly married and settled into Everard's isolated country home, The Willows. But everything about the mansion is shadowed with the specter of Vera, its previous mistress. As Everard gradually becomes increasingly overbearing and abusive, Lucy begins to wonder about the circumstances of Vera's "accidental" death.
    This darkly comic novel by the author of Enchanted April is believed to have inspired the Daphne du Maurier classic Rebecca. Elizabeth von Arnim based Vera on her own ill-starred marriage to a member of the British aristocracy. Her 1921 novel offers a witty and compelling look at a sinister possibility of a marriage in which a self-absorbed bully can exploit a naïve young woman, and romantic delusions can keep a wife in thrall to her husband's tyranny.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateFeb 28, 2018
    ISBN9780486829678
    Author

    Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Elizabeth von Arnim was born in Australia in 1866 and her family moved to England when she was young. Katherine Mansfield was her cousin and they exchanged letters and reviewed each other’s work. Von Arnim married twice and lived in Berlin, Poland, America, France and Switzerland, where she built a chalet to entertain her circle of literary friends, which included her lover, H. G. Wells. Von Arnim’s first novel, Elizabeth in Her German Garden, was semiautobiographical and a huge success on publication in 1898. The Enchanted April, published in 1922, is her most widely read novel and has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen. She died of influenza in 1941.

    Read more from Elizabeth Von Arnim

    Related to Vera

    Related ebooks

    Historical Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      From ESTRANGEMENT

      May 1, 2022

      From ESTRANGEMENT
      4 min read

    • Article

      Justice

      Mar 15, 2018

      I had been told that the interviewer was waiting for me outside in the hotel garden. The muffled oceanic roar of traffic rose steadily from the nearby road. She was sitting alone on a bench amid the raw planted beds and network of gravel paths, gazin

      22 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Poet Upstairs

      Jan 22, 2018

      The Poet Upstairs
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Touch Of Summer

      Sep 7, 2020

      Leila had found a place she could go. A sandy cove, a short cycle ride from her flat, where she could spread out her beach towel, put on her headphones and watch the sea lap up onto the shore. She wasn’t sure what kept this spot so quiet, when the ot

      5 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Glove

      Mar 4, 2024

      The Glove
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 115

      Dec 5, 2023

      The Art of Poetry No. 115
      27 min read

    • Article

      My Friend Juniper

      Apr 5, 2023

      My Friend Juniper
      24 min read

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Ferryman

      Oct 26, 2020

      At the end of the summer, when the high tide of tourists had gone out but autumn proper was still a few weeks away, the foot ferry still ran on the August timetable. It was always dead quiet when he made the first run over to Fowey from Polruan; even

      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2021

      A type of hickory, it grows by water.So are we fools to drive to the riverthe day after our most savage stormshave finally stopped to seea tree we’ve never seen before?To hike in cold mud through a leafless forest,to behold clearings now clutteredby

      5 min read

    • Article

      How to Bear Witness

      Jan 4, 2023

      What a gift it is to share your life with another person, and part of that gift is bearing witness. The post How to Bear Witness appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Noah Warren

      Dec 1, 2020

      Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streetsand in the ga

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Dawn ’til Dusk

      May 21, 2020

      From Dawn ’til Dusk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Freedom

      Aug 6, 2020

      Freedom
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ursula K. Le Guin

      Jun 15, 2018

      He was thinking of Lookfar, abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. As he drifted near sleep he began to remember sailing t

      15 min read

    • Article

      A double LIFE

      Sep 13, 2022

      A double LIFE
      6 min read

    • Article

      Writer’s Rock

      Mar 16, 2020

      Writer’s Rock
      5 min read

    • Article

      Remembering Your Roots

      Aug 2, 2022

      Remembering Your Roots
      6 min read

    • Article

      Remains

      Sep 1, 2017

      THIS IS what you think your mother’s remains will look like. The ash will be black, like all that soot in the fireplace. It will be heavy, like wet sand. There will not be too much of it. It will fit in a small urn with intricate designs on the borde

      6 min read

    • Article

      We All Have Our Stories

      Mar 1, 2021

      We All Have Our Stories
      14 min read

    • Article

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?

      Aug 8, 2019

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Vera

    4/5

    68 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim is perhaps a more disturbing tale than du Maurier?s Rebecca. At least at the end of Rebecca there is resolution and we find that Malcolm de Winter isn?t a monster, that it was indeed Rebecca who bloody well asked for it. Vera is the first wife of Everard Wemyss who meets her death by falling out of the window in her own home. Lucy, innocent girl who has just been devastated by the death of her father, meets Everard and they cling to one another and eventually marry. From the beginning we feel suspicious towards Everard because he is not grieving it seems, just upset by the fact that he should have to go through this period of mourning and that he was made to go through an inquest into his wife?s death (of which he was acquitted). All of this is Vera?s fault and not his. We feel for Lucy on the other hand because she is young and only has an aunt now to look after her. After her marriage, she witnesses Everard?s temper for herself and is worried, but manages to overcome all questions with her love for him. The aunt does try and intervene and gives him a piece of her mind, but not nearly enough in my opinion. I was rooting for her all the way through, but she ends up leaving Lucy to him. Which leaves us wondering how long it will take until Lucy throws herself out the window?
    • 4/5
      On the day of her father's funeral, Lucy meets Everard Wemyss, whose wife has very recently died under shocking circumstances (she fell to her death from a window of a room in their house). Lucy and Wemyss quickly establish a friendship and fall in love, although Lucy's aunt, Miss Entwhistle, is suspicious of Wemyss. Even before she knows the details of his wife's death, her suspicions are aroused by the fact that, so soon after two tragedies, he wears 'light grey trousers' - not black or even dark grey ones. Though a bit 'twittery', Miss Entwhistle seems to have the measure of Wemyss. She knows that if Lucy is determined to marry Wemyss she will do so, and that being warned off him will only drive her more firmly into his arms, and so the marriage goes ahead.One she's married, however, Lucy quickly learns the true nature of her husband. He likes Lucy to call him 'baby', and he does indeed behave like a spoilt, sulky child for much of the time. A wrong word, a misplaced laugh, and Wemyss goes into a sulk from which Lucy has to coax him. He seems to think he owns Lucy, body and soul. "Her thoughts mustn't wander, she had discovered; her thoughts were to be his as well as the rest of her. Was ever a girl so much loved? she asked herself, astonished and proud; but, on the other hand, she was dreadfully sleepy."He pretends to take her views and desires into account, but this is an illusion. He asks her if she wants to do something, but having given a few 'wrong' answers she has come to realise that "his question was only decorative, and his little love should instinctively, he considered, like what he liked".After the honeymoon, Wemyss takes Lucy back to his home, The Willows, in which he lived with his first wife Vera, and where she died. Lucy hates the thought of sleeping in the same bed Vera slept in, and is horrified to learn that Wemyss hasn't re-decorated or changed the house at all since Vera's death. Wemyss doesn't understand Lucy's feelings, calling them 'morbid'. "Lucy fought and fought against it, but always at the back of her mind was the thought, not looked at, slunk away from, but nevertheless fixed, that there at The Willows, waiting for her, was Vera."Married, Wemyss treats Lucy like a child, either ordering her around or consoling her with babytalk. Lucy is perplexed by her husband and decides that the only way she can cope with her marriage is to 'let it wash over one'.Rather like Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Rochester, Vera is present and yet not-present. It seems to me significant that Wemyss keeps all the books locked up, apart from the ones that belonged to Vera - one of which, we're told more than once, is Wuthering Heights. It would be neat if it had been Jane Eyre instead, but perhaps Vera had that book, too. When Miss Entwhistle visits Lucy and finds Vera's books, she's drawn to the conclusion that Vera longed to escape, and found her escape through death. She notes that, "The greater proportion of the books in Vera's shelves were guide-books and time-tables." She realises that Lucy is trapped, and tries to make allowances for Wemyss, but the man is impossible. She understands Wemyss: "He was like a great cross schoolboy, she thought, sitting there being rude; but unfortunately a schoolboy with power." She ends up telling him a few home truths, but Wemyss couldn't be more blind to his own faults and Miss Entwhistle's perceptive remarks fail to penetrate.At the end of the book, he turns Miss Entwhistle out into the night. She, like Vera, makes her escape. We can only wonder what will happen to Lucy after a few years - or even months - of marriage to a man who - as Miss Entwhistle has realised - actively enjoys 'being in a temper, and having me to bully'. [April 2005]
    • 4/5
      Blackly humorous, Vera treads perfectly between the horrifying and commonplace in its portrait of a deeply - indeed, dangerously - dysfunctional courtship and marriage. It's a brilliant fiction which remains both bitingly funny and rather frighteningly 'true'.
    • 4/5
      The day young Lucy Entwhistle's father died, she was only able to stand, staring, feeling nothing. Along came Wemyss, a man of about forty-five, who had just lost his wife. This shared bereavement brings he and Lucy together: Wemyss makes all the plans for Mr. Entwhistle's funeral, they spend much time together comforting each other, and they soon become engaged. Lucy's aunt, Miss Entwhistle, is rather perplexed by the whole turn of affairs, but she determines to like Wemyss for Lucy's sake, even though he shows all the character of a spoiled brat.Vera was Wemyss's former wife, who died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, yet whose memory permeates much. At first, I thought the story was going to be headed in a similar direction as Rebecca, but even though I didn't particularly like Max de Winter, he had nothing on Wemyss. Everard Wemyss has made my top five list of most hated characters in literature. His behavior made me want to slap him, shake him, finally to punch him. I loved Miss Entwhistle's standing up to him, and wished Lucy was more able to assert herself. But like many in an unhealthy relationship, she's quick to forgive and forget. Reading about them as they progressed from engagement into marriage was like watching a car crash - you know it's going to be terrible, but can't help continuing.
    • 5/5
      Seems like a precursor in some ways to 'Rebecca'.
    • 4/5
      ‘My little love isn’t going to do anything that spoils her Everard’s plans after all the trouble he has taken?’ he said, seeing that with her mouth slightly open she gazed at him in an obvious astonishment and didn’t say a word.Vera, written in 1921 and partly informed by von Arnim’s marriage to Earl Russell (the older brother to Bertrand), is as fascinating as it is frightening.Vera tells the story of young Lucy who marries the somewhat older Everard Wemyss and finds herself caught. The tragedy of it is, she doesn’t realise it.Vera is often described as the prototype for Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). In some ways this is quite true:Vera, like Rebecca, lends her name to the book’s title. Vera, like Rebecca, is the late wife of the husband. Vera, like Rebecca, haunts the young new wife.However, on levels of dysfunction, Vera surpasses Rebecca by far.Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none.I pretty quickly in the book wanted to shake Lucy and make her see what she was getting into, but I am not sure she would have listened.As the story progressed, dysfunction turned into what can only be described as a nightmare, and I truly hoped that Lucy, much like von Arnim, would find a means to escape from psycho-Everard’s clutches. Or that she’d push him off a cliff. Or the top floor window.Well, that was at the very beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable. Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in regard to The Willows.
    • 5/5
      Not one of von Arnim's well-known ones, but SO brilliantly written. As someone married to a man frighteningly reminiscent of Everard Wemyss, I felt the author was writing for me, and that the strange, irrational arguments, to which i am accustomed, actually have been experienced by another!The novel opens with a young girl sitting outside her house in shock; her beloved father has just died, leaving her an orphan; her only relative a spinster aunt. Along the road comes an older man, apparently in a similar situation following his wife's recent death. Offering help and support to young Lucy, it is no surprise that a relationship soon ensues.However Everard's behaviour soon comes to seem a little odd - from bestowing caresses and babytalk on his 'Little Love', to becoming rapidly and not always predictably furious at any check to his plans. And when we learn of his late wife's demise- plunging from an upper window, thought to be suicide, we become still more dubious.This is an extremely tense-making book. The reader is amazed at Everard's lack of perspicacity, expecting Lucy to move happily into the room through whose window Vera took her life. His controlling, overbearing personality and utter self-absorption, lead to a character equally comic and menacing."She was afraid of him and she was afraid of herself in relation to him. He seemed outside anything of which she had experience...There seemed no way, at any point, by which one could reach him."Lucy soon learns that her husband's tactics of bullying and forever taking offence, mean there can never be a frank exchange of views, that she must weigh her every word."Come here, my little savage- come and sit on your husban's knee and tell him all about it."...But she didn't tell him all about it, first because by now she knew that to tell him all about anything was asking for trouble, and second because he didn't really want to know. Everard, she was beginning to realise with much surprise, preferred not to know. He was not merely incurious as to other people's ideas and opinions, he definitely preferred not to know."The eponymous Vera never appears in person- she is the dead wife, and while Lucy sees her portrait, peruses her books and muses on her, it is with an increasing fellow-feeling...Based on the author's second marriage (to the brother of philosopher Bertrand Russell), this was a masterly portrait of an emotionally abusive marriage.
    • 5/5
      This is book is really heartbreaking. It is so well-written and so real that I felt emotionally involved. Vera is a sad story, but I think it is very instructive as well. Everard Wemyss was apparently based on Elizabeth von Arnim's second husband, which is very sad.

      Some quotes I bookmarked:

      "She had never met any one so comfortable to lean on mentally...Such perfect rest, listening to his talk. No thinking needed. Things according to him were either so, or so. With her father things had never been either so, or so; and one had had to frown, and concentrate, and make efforts to follow and understand his distinctions, his infinitely numerous, delicate, difficult distinctions. Everard's plain division of everything into two categories only, snow-white and jet-black, was as reposeful as the Roman church. She hadn't got to strain or worry, she had only to surrender."

      "Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night considering her behaviour during the day. Love had made her so. Love did make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved. The assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about."

      Here is a longer excerpt:

      "But she didn't tell him all about it, first because by now she knew that to tell him all about anything was asking for trouble, and second because he didn't really want to know. Everard, she was beginning to realise with much surprise, preferred not to know. He was not merely incurious as to other people's ideas and opinions, he definitely preferred to be unconscious of them.

      "This was a great contrast to the restless curiosity and interest of her father and his friends, to their insatiable hunger for discussion, for argument; and it much surprised Lucy. Discussion was the very salt of life for them,—a tireless exploration of each other's ideas, a clashing of them together, and out of that clashing the creation of fresh ones. To Everard, Lucy was beginning to perceive, discussion merely meant contradiction, and he disliked contradiction, he disliked even difference of opinion. 'There's only one way of looking at a thing, and that's the right way,' as he said, 'so what's the good of such a lot of talk?'

      "The right way was his way; and though he seemed by his direct, unswerving methods to succeed in living mentally in a great calm, and though after the fevers of her father's set this was to her immensely restful, was it really a good thing? Didn't it cut one off from growth? Didn't it shut one in an isolation? Wasn't it, frankly, rather like death? Besides, she had doubts as to whether it were true that there was only one way of looking at a thing, and couldn't quite believe that his way was invariably the right way."