READING AND RESPONDING TO ENGLISH WOMEN WRITERS: ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF, MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH AND HELENE DRUSKOWITZ

Abstract

This essay investigates what Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), the two pre-eminent women writers in German in the nineteenth century, knew of English women's writing, and how they knew it. This includes the role of cultural mediators: Anna Jameson in the case of Droste and in the case of Ebner, more importantly, Helene Druskowitz (1856–1918). The Viennese scholar, critic and philosopher is a unique figure, and her role in Anglo-German literary relations is little known. Her book Drei englische Dichterinnen (Three English Poetesses, 1885), on Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot, is arguably the most substantial critical study of female creative genius to be published in German in the late nineteenth century, and it is a singular, feminist contribution to Anglo-German literary relations at a time when the focus was firmly on Shakespeare, Scott, Byron and Dickens. It is clear that for these women writers in German, the existence of a female tradition of writing in English was a source of encouragement and provided points of reference for their own literary and critical work.