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

Abstract

The ‘Other Germany’ in the title of Linda K. Hughes’s recent monograph refers to a quotation taken from Vernon Lee’s Genius Loci (1899), which also provides the book’s epigraph. Lee explains: “The Germany I am speaking of is not the one which colonises or makes cheap goods, or frightens the rest of the world in various ways ...” (cited in Hughes, vi, 1). Lee’s view of Germany was very different, informed both by her childhood experiences of the nurses and governess who raised her and by subsequent travel. Hughes quotes her as stating that “... of all the countries, the first to be good to me was Germany ...” (cited in Hughes, 187). This experience of Germany “being good” to women writers and travellers is shared across the ten case studies in Hughes’s book. To these figures, Germany was not an imperial or economic threat, as other contemporary portrayals frequently suggest, but a site and symbol of “crosscultural freedoms and female opportunity”. Part group biography, part literary study on a theme, part alternative cross-disciplinary history, Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany shows how ten women writers developed through visits to, engagement with and writing about different German places across the long nineteenth century.