The Countess from Kirribilli: The Mysterious and Free-Spirited Literary Sensation who Beguiled the World by Joyce Morgan

She was 'amused, cynical, ironic, loving, gay, ferocious, cold, ardent but never gentle'. She was a whirlwind. She created around her the atmosphere of a Court at which her friends were either in disgrace or favour, a butt or a blessing.

ELIZABETH VON ARNIM may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary Sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen.

Her marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness. Her second marriage, to Bertrand Russell's brother, was a disaster. But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield and H.G. Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair.