Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Linda K. Hughes’s expansive, deeply researched book takes its title from her archive’s chronological tail end: Vernon Lee’s Genius Loci (1899). In the first of these collected travel writings, Lee relishes having found in Augsburg “the Germany which [she] loved . . . not the one which colonizes or makes cheap goods, or frightens the rest of the world in various ways; but the Germany which invented Christmas-trees, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Bach, and Mozart, and which seems to be vouched for in a good many works of classic literature: Jean Paul’s ‘Siebenkäs,’ for instance, and Goethe’s memoirs, and those of Jung Stilling” (13–14). Hughes adopts that quotation’s first half as her epigraph, then uses it to spin out her own distinction between two Germanies.On the one hand, there is the Germany most familiar to Victorianists, “the one imported to England by Thomas Carlyle, musicians in British concert halls, biblical scholars affected by German Higher Criticism, or late-century intellectuals immersed in aesthetic theory,” a reception history dominated by male actors (xiii). On the other, there is the feminist counternarrative offered by Hughes’s ten-woman corpus: Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Anna Mary Howitt, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Jessie Fothergill, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Amy Levy, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Lee herself. Several already feature in our accounts of that Carlyleian Germany, most notably Eliot for her translations of Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss, and Lee for her writings on Theodor Lipps. But rather than retread those paths, Hughes emphasizes other forms of transcultural engagement, focusing on the personal freedoms these Victorian women perceived and pursued in their travels to and writings on German-speaking states. The “works of classic literature” are certainly not forgotten. But there’s more attention here to the Christmas-tree side of Lee’s formulation: the sentimental, intimate, and interpersonal.Hughes situates this project with respect to a broader academic turn toward transnational history and literary history, but her primary theoretical frame is “ethnoexocentrism” (1). She borrows this term from the anthropologist Mercio Pereira Gomes, who defines it as authentic openness to and interest in otherness, a drive that counterbalances the innate ethnocentrism of any given culture. Though Hughes does not explicitly state this point, her approach is largely reparative in its commitment to fleshing out, rather than critiquing, the connections between Victorian women writers and the other Germany. As such, when she briefly places “ethnoexocentrism” in dialogue with “gendered cosmopolitanism,” the choice of interlocutors is selective (8). Hughes invokes Kwame Anthony Appiah, Steven Vertovec, and Robin Cohen as providing “the most useful articulations” of cosmopolitanism—that is, the articulations most similar to Gomes’s—before highlighting Appiah’s praise for “rooted cosmopolitanism” and Vertovec and Cohen’s remarks on the cosmopolitan’s ability to address “cultural multiplicity” (9). Likewise, when Edward Said’s discussion of exile is invoked, it is to highlight the state’s positive affordances for von Arnim’s “expatriate subjectivity” and her fiction’s “binocular cultural vision” (163, 177). These moves are not made naively. When Hughes draws from thinkers more invested in critique, she makes clear that hers is a selective transposition, and for the most part this approach pays off. It’s refreshing to have the throat-clearing kept to a minimum, and to get straight to the archive’s riches.Those treasures are especially noteworthy in the book’s opening two chapters on Jameson. In 1833, Jameson arrived in Weimar the independent wife of an unhappy marriage and the author of a well-regarded study on Shakespeare’s heroines: Characteristics of Women (1832). Both factors, Hughes suggests, helped her forge a connection with Ottilie von Goethe: Johann’s brilliant, brilliantly well-connected, and recently widowed daughter-in-law. Drawing on published accounts, unpublished material from the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, and a wealth of secondary sources, Hughes minutely reconstructs the Anglo-German networks that emerged from the Jameson–Goethe connection, and which would become so important for subsequent women travelers. More interesting still, Hughes shows how Jameson’s German ethnoexocentrism set the stage for the Canadian variant, which we find in her better-known Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)—a publication resulting from Jameson’s being forced, in 1836, to rejoin her husband in Toronto. Though Hughes presents her inquiry as limited to the Anglo-German axis, some of its best moments come when, as with Jameson, she follows how a Victorian’s German experiences and connections interwove with other “other” places and cultures.A judicious limit in geographical scope nonetheless allows for one of this book’s major strengths: its chronological range. We technically begin in 1833, with the meeting of Jameson and Goethe (here, always Ottilie!), and end in 1908, with the publication of Lee’s The Sentimental Traveler, but many chapters gesture back to Regency and eighteenth-century contexts. Moving case by case through those seven core decades, one gains a real sense of the evolution in opportunities that Germany afforded Hughes’s subjects. As she astutely points out, the desire for those freedoms, and the ability to pursue them, changed when Victorian women gained access to universities and royal academies. While the first chapters focus on highly networked individuals and families—those whose voyages and residences were acquired through introductory letters—the latter take us to femes sole traveling unchaperoned, and then to the expatriates “who relished freedoms and career opportunities trailblazed by New Women” (162). Hughes traces similarities across the period but deftly preempts our temptation to collapse all Victorian Germanophiles into one.Such distinctions are especially important given how the book brings together writers of significant variance in canonicity. Given the study’s breadth, most readers will have prior investments only in a subset of the figures, but the book is written to invite a range of expertise. Only Eliot’s “reasons for traveling to Germany” are assumed to “need no rehearsal,” though they are subsequently glossed just in case (8). Both Hughes’s style and corpus thus encourage a sort of “archive-exocentrism,” eliciting our keen interest in those figures and texts who lie just outside our comfort zone. The approach also generates illuminating juxtapositions. Most notable is perhaps the extended comparison of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Fothergill’s The First Violin (1878), two novels Hughes sharply triangulates with the work of the German-Jewish writer Paul Heyse. I won’t be the only reader wishing there were more recent editions of The First Violin or translations of Heyse’s Kinder der Welt (1878) that I could assign next time I teach Deronda.Though Hughes takes gender as her organizing identity category, sexuality plays a central role from the book’s opening to its close. The word “lesbian” is reserved for just four of the subjects—Bradley, Cooper, Levy, and Lee—but Jameson’s Anglo-German networks are depicted as deeply queer. And when it comes to literary texts, be they Gaskell’s short story “The Grey Woman” (1861) or Fothergill’s novel, Hughes has a keen eye for subplots and subtexts that work against the heteronormative grain. These intimacies, she suggests, were constructed not only across cultural-linguistic divisions, but also through them. I was particularly taken by the discussions of how bilingualism structured Cooper’s erotic encounter with her Dresden nurse and of how German puns and intertexts swell the lesbian undertones in Levy’s poetry. As Hughes keenly observes toward the book’s end, individual queer connections could inspire a more expansive sort of ethnoexocentrism. The pivotal Jameson–Goethe meeting, she remarks, “kindled not only Jameson’s feelings for Goethe but also Jameson’s love for a country and a culture where a woman’s life could harmoniously combine sociability and intellectuality as a living reality, not an imagined dream” (207).Following feelings has its drawbacks, however, and the chief one here is that Germany’s “living reality” remains largely the one perceived by Victorians. Only rarely are their judgments cross-referenced with alternative sources, either nineteenth-century or contemporary. At one point, Hughes cites an Athenaeum letter taking issue with Jameson’s laudatory characterization of German Damenstifte (lay-convents) and chalks the errors up to her “implicit trust in all that Goethe sent” (54). Here, I longed for some scholarly arbitration. Were Jameson’s trusts misplaced? Had Goethe misrepresented the Damenstifte, and if so, why? The occasional citation from a historian like David Blackbourn or Ute Frevert would have gone a long way. Indeed, it’s not until Chapter 6 that we hear of Germany’s becoming a “unified modern state,” and though Hughes astutely differentiates Anna Mary Howitt’s experience in Catholic Bavaria, there’s little attention to what distinctions, if any, Victorians perceived in Saxony versus Baden (130). As for post-1871, what did New Women travelers think about the Kulturkampf, the contested Alsace-Lorraine territory, and Wilhelm II’s imperialist foreign policy?Such queries take us away from this book’s “other Germany.” But it’s worth pointing out that Lee does not actually use the term to refer to the sentimental Germany she finds at Augsburg, but rather to “the one [she does] not love”: the mercantile and bellicose reality into which, at the sketch’s end, she’s “plunging once more” (18). Hughes alludes briefly to Lee’s pacifism during World War I, but as the colonizing allusion attests, it did not take her until 1914 to realize that Germany contained Weltpolitik as well as the genius loci. Engaging that duality—and the ambivalences it provoked in Victorian women writers—would have made Hughes’s excellent study more subtle still.

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