Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1940 novel (her last), Mr. Skeffington, tells the story of a woman’s rather desperate effort to grasp at her lost youth as she approaches the age of fifty. She has a hard time accepting middle age and yearns for the health and beauty she feels that she has been robbed of by the passage of time.

In a contrived plot, she encounters all the men whose hearts she broke in the bloom of youth. Spoiled, vain Fanny Trellis Skeffington, who had long since divorced her husband (Mr. Skeffington of the title), must come to terms with her life as it is, not as she wishes it to be. 

This novel wasn’t as popular as the author’s debut novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), nor as successful in literary terms as Vera (1922), it nonetheless became well known through its 1944 film adaptation. Elizabeth Von Arnim, who died in 1941, didn’t live to see this adaptation.

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