Mr. Skeffington by Elizabeth von Arnim (1940)
By Taylor Jasmine | On October 6, 2015 | Updated July 7, 2023 | Comments (0)

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.
A brief synopsis of Mr. Skeffington
From the 2006 Virago edition:
“Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh.”
Approaching the watershed of her fiftieth birthday, Fanny, having long ago divorced Mr Skeffington and dismissed him from her thoughts for many years, is surprised to find herself thinking of him often.
While attempting to understand this invasion, she meets, through a series of coincidences and deliberate actions, all those other men whose hearts she broke. But their lives have irrevocably changed and Fanny is no longer the exquisite beauty with whom they were all once enchanted.
If she is to survive, Fanny discovers, she must confront a greatly altered perception of herself. With the delicate piquancy for which she is renowned, Elizabeth von Arnim here reveals the complexities involved in the process of aging and in re-evaluating self-worth.
A review in the Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Georgia, November, 1940) concluded that “The climax is touching and beautiful, but the reader cannot help feeling that they have waded through an awful lot of inanity and ‘much ado about nothing’ to get to it. If all who are beautiful go through such torture as did Lady Skeffington when their physical beauty begins to fade, then truly there are many advantages to being plain.”
Other reviews of Mr. Skeffington were similarly mixed, as in the typical review presented following:
A Woman’s Pitiful Effort to Regain Her Allure
From the original review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April, 1940: Elizabeth’s Mr. Skeffington portrays a story of a woman’s pitiful effort to regain her allure. Moving, even absorbing, could be the story of a woman who can not accept the fact that middle age and protracted illness have robbed her forever of the beauty which was once hers.
Still more absorbing should such a story be when it portrays this woman’s pathetic endeavors to conceal her loss of beauty — through the wearing of clothes that might have suited her well when she was thirty and not fifty.
Desperate for love and admiration
There’s something which invokes pity in the spectacle of this woman, once the cynosure of all men, turning desperately to each of her former admirers for the love which none can now give her.
Yet this novel, the 19th to the credit of Elizabeth*, the pseudonym of a prolific woman author, does not make most effective use of its material.
[*Elizabeth von Arnim, for most of her writing career used the first name Elizabeth, which itself was a nom de plume — she was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Australia in 1866]Nothing more than a facile pen?
Mr. Skeffington, set in London, has its moments, but when the book has been finished the feeling is inescapable that the novel is merely the clever creation of a facile pen, and nothing more.
Its moving moments come too infrequently because the “heroine,” Fanny Skeffington, is scarcely able to stimulate sympathy; pity alone can she invoke, because she is incapable of a serious, broad-visioned, really intelligent thought.
Interested is she in herself alone, and her creator portrays Fanny’s vain and petty nature so convincingly that the reader simply can’t care too much whether Fanny ever does manage to readjust herself to a life now devoid forever of ego-gratifying glamour and adoration.
Futile rekindling of old romances
Of course Elizabeth achieved many effective passages. Decidedly interesting is Fanny’s futile endeavor to stir the embers of decades-dead romances, since these reveal Fanny to be a pitiful, empty-headed creature, happy only when she was able to conquer men, and to scintillate.
There’s a good deal of facile and discerning writing in the passages which tell of Fanny’s visit to the famous London physician, Sir Silton Byles, who tells Fanny there’s nothing really wrong with her, that she has simply grown old chronologically, and hasn’t achieved comparable development mentally.
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Mr. Skeffington (1944 film)
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She’d do well to take Mr. Skeffington back
Wisely but brutally Dr. Byles advises Fanny that, since she isn’t really bright and no longer has her beauty with which to cope with life’s problems, she would do well to take back her Jewish husband, Job Skeffington, from whom she had been divorced years ago and whose affection she had always found boring and even unpleasant; much more boring and much less desirable than the amours of the long list of men who had succeeded him.
Proud Fanny, however, refuses this sound advice. Instead she makes unsuccessful attempts to revive old romances. These passages have a real bite to them; they possess the cutting quality of cleverly conceived caricature. And there’s a lot of smart writing to discern in Elizabeth’s satirizing of the upper-class social set in which Fanny, daughter of a duke, moves all her life.
Elizabeth manipulates her literary blade skillfully in dealing with the snobbishness of this aristocratic set, which was shocked when Fanny married Job. A glib stylist, Elizabeth, but an incompletely satisfying book is Mr. Skeffington.
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One of this author’s best known books is
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
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