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==Christine==

Despite her unhappy first marriage to a German aristocrat, Arnim does not appear to have felt any particular antipathy towards Germany, whose language and culture she knew well. On the contrary, she “treated Germans no less than English according to their individual merits” (De Charms, 188). She had responded to the waves of anti-German feeling in the early stages of World War I “with many reservations” (De Charms, 188).

”Christine”, which paints a consistently unsympathetic portrait of the Germans, is therefore something of a departure. It was quickly co-opted as anti-German propaganda (De Charms, 188), but there is no suggestion it was written with that purpose. Instead, Leslie De Charms speculates that the novel’s anger against the Germans was prompted specifically by the death of her daughter Felicitas in Berlin in 1916. While the cause of her death was pneumonia, Armin fet that it was “just as directly the result of the war as [her brother (?)] Johnnie’s” (quoted by De Charms, 189).

In any case, few reviewers were deceived by the pretence that the letters where real, pointing to implausibilities such as:

* the high quality of the writing (”The Dial”, Chicago, 13 September 1917)

* the inclusion of autobiographical and other exposition that should not have been necessary in a young woman’s letters to her own mother (”The Dial”, Chicago, 13 September 1917)

* a panoptic view of German society and a familiarity with the country’s elites that is unlikely to have been available to an isolated foreign student from a modest background.

Some reviewers took it for granted that the letters were fiction, focusing instead on the ethics and taste of the imposture, and concluding that it did not reflect well on “Cholmondeley” or her publisher. (De Charms, 188-189).

While the keen-eyed reviewer for ”The Athenaeum” observed that “in style and feeling ”Christine” reminds one strongly of ”Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther” and other works of the Baroness von Arnim”, (Athenaeum, London, Book Review Digest, 1917) Arnim stuck with her single-use pseudonym and continued her “fierce repudiation of authorship, even among intimate friends” (De Charms, 189). De Charms speculates that Arnim was mainly concerned to protect her daughter Beatrix, still living in Germany, effectively behind enemy lines (De Charms, 189).