Two women, strangers to each other, notice the same advertisement in a London newspaper: a medieval castle in Italy, wisteria, sunshine, April. They cannot quite afford it alone. They invite two more women, also strangers, also grey with English winter. What happens in the castle above the Mediterranean is not a plot exactly — it is more like a slow chemical reaction in which four people who have forgotten what they feel like gradually remember. Von Arnim's novel is a comedy of a very particular kind: warm, astute, and quietly wise about the way that beauty works on people who have been too long without it. Each of the four women is unhappy for different reasons, and each discovers something different in the Italian light. That it sounds slight and proves so quietly powerful is the measure of the writer's art.
