Fellow Travellers: Eighteenth-Century Englishwomen and German Literature

Abstract

Fellow Travellers: Eighteenth-Century Englishwomen and German Literature SYNDY McMILLEN CONGER Generous attention has been paid to the efforts of the few cosmo­ politan Englishmen in the eighteenth century who introduced their countrymen to an emerging German literature: the pioneer Henry Mackenzie, the astute critic and translator William Taylor of Norwich, the popularizer Matthew G. Lewis, their mutual protege Sir Walter Scott, and the enthusiastic travellers Henry Crabb Robinson and Thomas Holcroft. What remains unnoticed is that these mediators had female counterparts: fellow readers, translators, essayists, imi­ tators, and fellow travellers. As individuals, these women writers have not been all or altogether neglected, but they have not been generally recognized as students of German culture or literature. Perhaps in this instance Jane Austen has encouraged some neglect, for she introduces the subject of female Germanophilia in Northanger Abbey only to ridicule it. Of the seven novels that Isabella Thorpe has in mind for Catherine Morland to read once she finishes The Myster­ ies of Udolpho, six are linked, in subtitle if not in subject matter, to Germany.1 Actually, none of the real eighteenth-century English­ women investigating Germany or German literature were, like Isa­ bella and Catherine, silly young ladies in quest of shallow diversion. As a group they were intelligent, mature, and diverse. Their lives nearly spanned the century, as their attitudes did the political spec­ trum, and their interest was hardly frivolous. They include the Au­ gustan Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Romantic Dorothy 109 110 / CONGER Wordsworth; the relatively conservative Hester Thrale Piozzi, Eliza­ beth Inchbald, and Ann Radcliffe; and radicals of varying degrees: Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Plumptre, Anna Seward, and Anna Lae­ titia Barbauld. The measurable effects of this feminine cosmopolitanism were modest. To be sure, most of these women writers enjoyed alliances with the male literati of the day which gave them some indirect influ­ ence on major literary developments. In addition to the well-known connections of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mrs. Thrale, and Wollstone­ craft, Inchbald was a friend of Holcroft and William Godwin and was quite respected in theatrical circles; Barbauld is known to have in­ spired, in addition to William Taylor, who dubbed her the "mother of my mind," Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Scott; and Radcliffe received tributes of various kinds from Ireland (Charles Robert Maturin) and Scotland (Scott) as well as from her own native England (Lewis, Austen, the Shelleys, Coleridge).2 Their story, how­ ever, finally has much more to do with reception3 than it does with influence. German culture did not, through these few women media­ tors, effect the larger shifts in the English literary scene that it would in the nineteenth century. What it did do was serve as a catalyst to feminine self-consciousness. An emerging sense of a women's literary community was perhaps the most visible sign of this new consciousness. Piozzi read Monta­ gu's travels; Seward and Radcliffe read Piozzi's; Mary Shelley, of course, read the works of her mother, Wollstonecraft; and Austen and Mary Shelley absorbed Radcliffe.4 Even firmer than the women's sense of belonging to a group was the unity attributed to their efforts by lit­ erary journals of the day. They were, for better or worse, often dis­ cussed under the general heading, "The German School."5 The real or imagined communality of their literary enterprise, however, should not be exaggerated, for from the beginning their Germanophilia was noticeably extra-literary and self-absorbed. Their preference was for the German literature of sensibility, the literature of Empfmdsamkeit with its extra-literary concern for realms of experience felt to be underprivileged—the individual, the emo­ tional, the feminine—often at the expense of the classical unities or precise generic identity. They were, moreover, indiscriminately per­ sistent about that preference. Even well into the volatile 90s when the quality of imported German literature had sunk demonstrably and when most Englishmen involved in literary pursuits had polarized and then grown weary of the debate about it (the anti-Jacobin review­ ers condemning it as dangerous to family, church, and state, and the Englishwomen and German Literature I 111 remaining radicals tempering or disguising their youthful enthusiasm6), women...