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

A vivid account of the alternative, emancipatory Germany that progressive British women writers discovered and wrote about, 1833-1910.

Linda Hughes (Author)

9781316512845, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 June 2022

306 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.58 kg

'Linda K. Hughes brings Anglo-German literary relations to the foreground of this ambitious study[, which] traces the increasing mobility, independence, and cosmopolitanism of successive generations of women writers who worked in conversation with their German counterparts and were immeasurably enriched by the exchange.' Joanne Shattock, Victorian Periodicals Review

Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.

1. Entrée to the 'other' Germany: Anna Jameson, Ottilie von Goethe, and their women's network
2. Germany through a female lens: Anna Jameson's writings, 1834-1860
3. Networked families in Germany: Mary Howitt, Anna Mary Howitt, and Elizabeth Gaskell
4. An unbeliever in Germany: Marian Evans (George Eliot), 1854-5
5. The Anglo-German fiction of George Eliot and Jessie Fothergill: Daniel Deronda (1876) and The First Violin (1878)
6. New woman travellers and translators: Michael Field and Amy Levy
7. An Anglo-German expatriate-citizen: Elizabeth von Arnim
8 Queer borders: Vernon Lee's haunted expatriate writings.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]