Mary Annette Beauchamp was born in 1866, in Australia. She was taken by her parents to England when she was three, and spent the rest of her life in England, Europe, and the USA where she died in 1941.
She married Count von Arnim in 1891, and had five children with him. In 1898 she published her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden anonymously, as 'by Elizabeth', and eventually even her friends and family called her Elizabeth.
The book was very successful, and went through many editions. Like her other twenty or so books it is witty, and is semi-autobiographical -- at least in the sense of being as much reminiscences of what she would have like to have happened as what actually happened. There is much more description of her garden and her interactions with family and visitors than plot or character development.
The source text was taken from the University of Adelaide ebook library, and checked against the 1900 Macmillan edition. I have silently corrected typos, restored italics and diacritics, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com
I have provided translations of French and German phrases as end notes, but have omitted the illustrations.
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