Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity by Linda K. Hughes (review)

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• Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity by Linda K. Hughes
• Joanne Shattock (bio)

Linda K. Hughes, Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. xiv + 282, $99.99/ £75.00 hardcover.

Returning from a trip to Germany in 1841, Elizabeth Gaskell recalled her surprise and delight in meeting Mary Howitt in Heidelberg, not least because the Quaker author was dressed in colourful satin and sported a leghorn bonnet with drooping white feathers. More than a decade later, Marian Evans—in Weimar on what was, in effect, her honeymoon with George Henry Lewes—observed with interest that women attended the theatre unaccompanied, something unimaginable in London at that time. A country that permitted such personal freedom, whether sartorial or more substantial, proved attractive to successive Englishwomen, Linda K. Hughes argues in her wide-ranging and impressively researched new book, Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity. Hughes selects ten women writers whose travels in Germany from the 1830s through the first decade of the twentieth century engendered a sense of freedom, both personal and intellectual, and created opportunities that were not available at home. Some, like Gaskell, Howitt, and the future George Eliot, travelled with partners and children. Others, like Anna Jameson, Jessie Fothergill, Michael Field (the pen name of Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper), and Amy Levy, travelled on their own. At the end of the century, Elizabeth von Arnim and Vernon Lee encountered Germany as expatriates, bringing a transnational perspective to the experience.

The "other" Germany of Hughes's title is the Germany of talented, independent women and their circles, from whom each generation of English-women [End Page 676] directly or indirectly benefited. The first chapter, on Anna Jameson, Ottilie Von Goethe, and their "women's network," describes the impact of Goethe's gifted daughter-in-law on Jameson. Theirs was one of the great women's friendships of the nineteenth century, as Hughes recounts. Her research reveals a passionate Jameson, in love with Ottilie, devotedly caring for the latter's illegitimate child, and writing Social Life in Germany (1840) in collaboration with her. Mary Howitt spent three years in Germany with her husband William, making contacts that would later prove useful in Howitt's Journal (1847–48). Their daughter Anna Mary Howitt was an art student in Munich, taking private tuition from a professor at the university because women were not permitted to register. Installments of her memoir, An Art-Student in Munich (1853), were published in the Ladies' Companion, Household Words, and the Athenaeum. Elizabeth Gaskell returned to Germany accompanied by two of her daughters in the late 1850s and published two stories arising from her experience: "The Grey Woman," serialized in All the Year Round in January 1861, and "Six Weeks at Heppenheim," published in the Cornhill in May 1862.

Of Hughes's ten subjects, George Eliot had the longest association with Germany, visiting it first with Lewes in 1854 and returning more than eight times, the last in 1880—ironically on her second honeymoon, this time with John Cross. Hughes points out that Marian Evans's hesitancy with spoken German, in contrast to her scholarly competence in the language, meant that she initially relied on Lewes to interpret daily conversation. His German was fluent; moreover, he had established contacts with male writers and intellectuals in earlier visits, leaving Marian to make inane conversation with the women, as she complained in a letter to her friend Caroline Hennell. What began as a negative impression of Germany and the Germans changed once her language skills improved. Meanwhile, her reading and reviewing continued apace. Hughes teases out Eliot's complicated response to the poet Heine and in particular his Jewishness, part of an intellectual journey that would culminate with Daniel Deronda. She discussed Heine in two reviews for the Leader, for which Lewes was the literary editor, and in the Westminster Review article "German Wit: Heinrich Heine" in January 1856. Her Leader reviews, though anonymous, were acknowledged as hers in the metropolitan circles in which she and Lewes moved...