Arnim launched her career as a writer with her satirical and semi-autobiographical Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898). Published anonymously, it chronicled the protagonist Elizabeth's struggles to create a garden on the family estate and her attempts to integrate into German aristocratic Junker society. In it, she fictionalized her husband as "The Man of Wrath". It was reprinted twenty times by May 1899, a year after its publication.Miranda Kiek (8 November 2011) "Elizabeth von Arnim: The forgotten feminist who’s flowering again", The Independent. Retrieved 19 July 2020. A bitter-sweet memoir and companion to it was The Solitary Summer (1899).
