14 h 41 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if everyone knows your duty, but no one thinks to ask what you want?
Ingeborg grows up in an English bishop's household, where obedience leaves little room for her own wishes. When she marries a German pastor, she moves from one church household to another. Her place changes, but the question remains: how much of her life can belong to her when others keep deciding what she ought to be?
In The Pastor's Wife, Elizabeth von Arnim turns marriage, household work and parish expectations into comedy with a serious edge. Neighbors watch, duty earns praise, and personal wishes slip out of sight. Close to Ingeborg, the dry, observant narrator finds both humor and tenderness in a woman beginning to find her own mind.
What you’ll discover
- A daughter shaped by duty Meet Ingeborg in a family where her father's position helps define her place.
- Marriage under watchful eyes Enter a pastor's household where private life faces the judgment of parish and neighbors.
- The work behind the role Notice the daily labor hidden within the respectable title of a pastor's wife.
- Wit with a serious edge Enjoy a dry, quick narrator who stays close to Ingeborg while keeping a smile in reserve.
- A quiet reach for freedom Explore what independence can mean without grand revolt, banners or speeches.
Who will love it
For readers who love domestic comedy with a serious edge, stories of marriage and duty, and a woman finding her own mind.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A bishop's daughter learns to obey
- Marriage to a German pastor
- The household and the work of a wife
- A step toward freedom
- What the story is really about
- Von Arnim's wit and how she tells it
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- Large print hardcover
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La Femme du pasteur
by Elizabeth von Arnim · 1914
Raised to obey, Ingeborg begins to discover wishes of her own within a world shaped by family, church and marriage.
Medium level10–20 hours to read25 languages
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A bishop's daughter learns to obey
The story begins with Ingeborg and the family that has formed her. Her father is a bishop, and that fact alone tells you much about the house she grows up in. It is a place of rank, routine and settled opinion, where people speak with confidence about what is proper and what is not. Von Arnim sets this world before us with a smile, and the smile is the first sign of how she means to treat it.
Ingeborg is not stupid or cold. She is a young woman who has learned that the easiest way to live is to do what is expected. Because nobody around her has ever asked what she thinks, she has had little chance to find out. The novel is interested in that gap, the space between a person and the self she might have become.
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What is The Pastor's Wife about?
It is a comic novel about Ingeborg, an Englishwoman raised in a bishop's home and married to a German pastor, who gradually discovers that she can want things for herself and begins to act on them.
Who wrote The Pastor's Wife and when?
Elizabeth von Arnim wrote it, and it was published in 1914. She was an author of Australian birth who lived in England and Germany and wrote many witty novels about women and marriage.
Is The Pastor's Wife a true story?
No, it is a novel. Von Arnim drew on her own experience of living as an Englishwoman in Germany and on her knowledge of marriage and church society, but Ingeborg's story is fiction.
The author
Elizabeth von Arnim
1866–1941 · British-Australian novelist
Elizabeth von Arnim was an Australian-born British novelist celebrated for her wry, sunlit comedies of manners — most famously The Enchanted April, the story of four women transformed by a month in an Italian castle.
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