In the fall of 1988, the luckiest of my American study abroad students journeyed from Florence to Berlin to participate in the biggest party in Europe that weekend, the celebration of the fall of the wall. Less conspicuously, another group has ever since had reason to celebrate that day. Victorianists now have access to collections and archives housed in locations formerly part of East Germany, locations often visited by Victorian authors themselves.Linda Hughes’s Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany successfully mines important archives in the United States and the United Kingdom, but her time in formerly unvisitable Weimar, for example, has most directly enriched her material on several of her subject/authors, including Anna Jameson, Ottilie von Goethe, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee. Such traveling/writing women visited Weimar for the literary associations with Schiller and Goethe, the Anna Amalia library, the presence of Franz Liszt, and possibly for opportunities for the cultural interminglings to which Hughes applies the term she adapts from Mercio Pereira Gomes: ethnoexocentrism. This unwieldy sounding yet highly applicable term governs Hughes’s evaluations of the extent to which her ten authors participated in cultural exchanges in Germany. She bases these evaluations on factors such as the writers’ fluency in the language, their choices in lodging, the number and intimacy of their German friendships, and how their writing focuses on cultural interactions among her characters and/or interactions with German-authored texts.Victorian Women Writers argues that Hughes’s authors engage in varying degrees and kinds of ethnoexocentrism. She distinguishes between the Carlylean British perception of Germany as militaristic and mercantile to focus on the “Other” Germany as described in her motto by Vernon Lee: “not the one which colonises [sic] or makes cheap goods, or frightens the rest of the world in various ways” (1). She groups her authors in three temporal phases. Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Mary Howitt, and, less neatly, George Eliot make up the first phase of traveler authors whose German networking enabled and enriched their writing. The second group consists of Jessie Fothergill, Edith Cooper/Katherine Bradley, and Amy Levy, three of whom (excepting Fothergill), could draw on previously unavailable university educations to help them travel and write as New Women. Finally, Hughes finds in the writing of expatriates Elizabeth von Arnim and Vernon Lee a thorough immersion in German/English cultural minglings—ethnoexocentrism at its peak.In a chapter-by-chapter reading, patterns among the women’s writings emerge. All the authors relish the freedom to move about the streets of Heidelberg or Dresden or Weimar by themselves. Many of them express their admiration for Heinrich Heine’s poetry, often a favorite for their translations into English. Hughes’s women sometimes share romantic impulses they express in letters and love poems and, more subtly, in fictional or poetic subtexts. Beginning with Jameson, they often show a sustained interest in communities of women ranging from informal reading groups, through charitable organizations, to both secular and religious convents. Such interests invite writing in genres formerly diminished as less-than-literary but celebrated by Hughes: translations, memoirs, letters, archaeological narratives, ghost stories, travelogs, sociology, children’s lit, and journalism, all treated by Hughes with an assiduous thoroughness, which often frees her authors from association with just one genre and presents them as competent in several at the same time that their more famous poetry and fiction receive due attention.Launching the book with two chapters on Anna Jameson provides opportunities for Hughes to reach beyond the established importance of Jameson’s well-known and frequently cited Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–52). Hughes begins her practice of reading and discussing the various genres and modes in which her authors write by noting that before Legendary Art Jameson had already published Characteristics of Women (1832) and two books about travel as well as Social Life in Germany (1840), the latter both a sociology of women in the north and translations of the plays of the eighteenth-century Weimarian Duchess Anna Amalia. After Legendary Art, she continued with artistic interests but added still more variety in her publications on Sisters of Charity Catholic and Protestant (1851) and The Communion of Labour (1856).Hughes thus revises Jameson’s reputation as purely and primarily an art historian by introducing her other German-connected publications and proposing her as a model of ethnoexocentrism prompted in part through her lifelong friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, the little-loved daughter-in-law of the country’s most esteemed literary figure. Hughes’s research coup, reading the letters between Jameson and her German friend in the Goethe-und-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, reveals an unshakable friendship between the two women that deepened Jameson’s intimacy with German culture and exemplifies some of the women’s friendships fortified by meetings and travels together in Europe.Another firm friendship, between Mary Howitt and Elizabeth Gaskell, as detailed in the following chapter on “Networked Families,” depended on their shared family time in Heidelberg, which allowed them to pass their Germanophilia onto daughters (and, presumably, to Howitt’s sons) both through immersing them in the culture and through their own writing. The two families located together near Heidelberg’s romantic settings of castle, river, and the university, where they connected with German Professor Friedrick Schlosser, whose instruction in the language Hughes regards as a turning point in the families’ developing ethnoexocentrism.For the Howitts, writing became a family business as they scrambled for publications that paid well and often demonstrated the results of their time abroad. Even when William and Mary Howitt conducted their journal in England, its first volume contained a good deal of Germaniana. In addition to her German-related editing, poetry writing, and translating (including of Heine), Howitt produced what Hughes regards as a classic of possibilities and problems involved in intercultural marriage, Which Is the Wiser: or People Abroad. A Tale for Youth (1842). Hence in both art and life, Howitt engages German culture with clearly didactic purposes directed at an audience of young people.Although the Howitts had other children, Hughes singles out daughter Anna Mary as a significant contributor to the Howitt family’s ethnoexocentrism because of her full immersion in German culture when studying in Bavaria and her well-known collection of previously published articles, An Art Student in Munich (1853). According to Hughes, this collection embodies exemplary ethnoexocentrism through its many sophisticated appreciations of German artists, interspersed with more mundane narratives of the persona’s winter fun when colorful sledges began whizzing through Munich or descriptions of Easter week at a number of (Catholic) churches.Hughes’s section on Gaskell departs from her pattern of trans-genre analysis by selecting from Gaskell’s many distinctively English-set novels (highly praised both then and now) two rarely read stories with German settings far from Cranford or Manchester. The minglings of English and German characters in “The Grey Woman” and “Six Weeks in Heppenheim” (1862), set near Heidelberg, justify Hughes’s inclusion of this highly English author. Gaskell’s stories reveal similarities to the plots, characters, and settings of sisters/authors who networked in Germany, notably involving possibilities for successful cross-cultural marriages, as well as gender reversals. Like Howitt, Gaskell traveled around Germany with daughters whose familiarity with German began early.Moving on to George Eliot, Hughes acknowledges restricting her emphasis to events and interactions during the George Henry Lewes–Marian Evans so-called honeymoon in Weimar and Berlin in 1854–55. Evans’s relative insulation resulted from her inexpertise in spoken language, her preoccupation with Lewes’s work in progress (his biography of Goethe), their insulated condition as an intimate couple, and the social limitations resulting from their nonmarital union. Regarding Evans’s interactions with German women, Hughes’s chapter struggles somewhat to prove a negative: that Evans limited her own opportunities for ethnoexocentrism by remaining aloof from most German women in Weimar and Berlin.Rather, the pattern in Weimar anticipates what Evans experienced on her return from Germany in 1855 through her salon-hosting days in the 1870s: some men brought their wives; some did not. In Berlin, contacts with women increased as the couple visited both Henriette Solmar’s salons and the family of Otto von Gruppe. During November they saw either Solmar or the Gruppes (including wife and children) at least twice a week in the evenings. Socializing at Solmar’s salon and enjoying family nights with the Gruppes and their friends, she could not avoid the many women guests. Even when the weather turned bad, Lewes and Evans participated in mixed-gender social events during Berlin days when, according to Evans’s Recollections, “one might very well go to a dinner party, a coffee party and a tea party, each of three hours’ duration, in the same day” (Eliot, Journals, 244). Together with Evans’s many publications on German subjects, in particular Heine, such interactions create a case for a slightly more immersive ethnoexocentrism than Hughes acknowledges.Meanwhile, Hughes points out accurately that the George Eliot journals, along with the articles for which they served as prewriting, show little interest in contemporary literature by German women or with German women themselves. But she also acknowledges that editorial policies rather than personal taste helped guide the choices of texts for the articles and reviews that targeted the Westminster Review, the Leader, and Fraser’s. Most scholars agree that her voices in these pieces, even without declaring gender, nevertheless skew male, further reducing the likelihood of promoting women’s literature. Even in Evans’s most substantial articles, her contributions to the British popularity of Heine, “erased” (103) his Jewish parentage and juggled his gingerly comments on women.However, the assumption that George Eliot avoided friendships with women and discouraged their writing for publication (a lingering residue of Elaine Showalter’s 1981 “The Greening of Sister George”; the disparagements from Eliza Lynn Linton; and the publication of her own “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”) dies hard. But as I have argued elsewhere (and long ago), despite its sharply satiric tone, the content of “Silly Novels” embodies “George Eliot’s Wollstonecraftian Feminism” (McCormack). As time went on, her friendships with women broadened and deepened (contacts with women on her 1858 German journey, for example, included many a Frau), and samples of her encouragement of women friends who wanted to publish extend from her 1852 encouragement for Bessie Parkes’s composition of her poem “Summer Sketches,” through her active search for publication possibilities for Barbara Bodichon’s 1865 letters from Spain, and in 1870 for a children’s story by Cara Bray. She even mustered praise for her future sister-in-law’s mediocre little romance “Marie of Villefranche” by Mary Cross, which appeared in Macmillan’s in 1871.Hughes’s concentration on Evans’s provincial naiveté regarding German and German-Jewish stereotyping during the mid-1850s opens the door for exploration of the modifications that followed during her later experience in Germany and her pivotal relationship with Judaic scholar and proto-Zionist Emmanuel Deutsch. When Hughes tackles Daniel Deronda in the next chapter, she offers Klesmer as the sole character in which German and English cultures interact, in his case by means of a marriage plot that echoes previous treatments of the possibilities for successful German-English marriages among ethnoexocentric women writers. At the same time, Hughes describes the German settings as mere “back stories and distant origins, however, rather than a culture that actively exerts a shaping force” (108). Although Eliot outlived her provincial stereotyping of Germans and Jews in 1854 and 1855, even her famously philosemitic novel does not excel in ethnoexocentrism.Mathilde Blind’s suggestion of a story by Paul Heyse as a parallel plot to the drowning scene in Deronda provides Hughes’s transition to Fothergill’s German-set The First Violin (1851, 1891). Having demonstrated an echo of Heyse’s The Lonely Ones (1858, 1869, 1870) in Gwendolen’s indecisiveness during Grandcourt’s man-overboard, Hughes begins the following chapter with an acknowledgment that she is pairing the ultra-canonical Eliot with a long-forgotten contemporary who nevertheless owes the plot of her novel The First Violin partly to the music plot of Deronda, but with reversals and New Woman challenges to traditional gender roles. The novel’s “saturated Anglo-Germanism” (114) constitutes a “conversation with Paul Heyse” (114). Heyse’s The Children of the World (1873) contributes to the plot, which, like the Alcharisi plot in Deronda (and even more like “Armgart”), engages in detail the steep requirements for professional success for women in music. Arriving in Germany, the protagonist, an aspiring soprano, continually transgresses the habits of her English life mainly to see men in public spaces such as restaurants and railway stations. Along with such radical departures for a still-respectable New Woman character, Fothergill creates de-masculinized male characters and adds other innovative touches such as inserting pages of sheet music and, as an additional example of her ethnoexocentrism, mixing German and English vocabularies inextricably, all of which exceeds George Eliot’s far less radical content and techniques.Additional authors of New Woman stories, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field), translators, dramatists, travel writers, and poets, began their time abroad in monoglot insulation from German culture, which yielded only to Cooper’s communications with a German nun while hospitalized in Dresden. There, they began to acquire enough German to travel more easily and, on return to Austria and other Alpine locations close to Germany, to indulge their taste for Wagnerian opera. Still, Hughes compares their ethnoexocentrism unfavorably to that of Amy Levy, fluent in German and able to interact with Germans from the start. As with members of the Howitt family, as well as Evans and Lewes, couples or family units tend to insulate more decisively than travel alone or with companions.After praising the New Woman feminism she finds in Levy’s stories and letters, Hughes focuses a good deal on her translations. Twenty-first-century scholars have come to accept the literary dimensions of translation alongside the traditional genres of prose and poetry (see France and Haynes, The Oxford History of Literary Translation). Spending much space on Heine, Hughes demonstrates how Levy’s translations of German poetry, rather than adhering to word-for-word or paraphrased renderings, translates in the freer technique of “imitation” (151), which calls for the greatest degree of creativity. Encoding romantic same-sex subtexts in her translations and in her own prose and poetry, Levy aligns herself with Bradley and Cooper, who also embodied the New Woman archetype in drawing on their experiences in the Other Germany.In her final chapters, Hughes finds her peak of ethnoexocentrism in expatriates Elizabeth von Armin and Vernon Lee. A German gräfin by marriage, von Arnim sustained her passion for the literature she read growing up in England and to which she often refers in her novels alongside an array of German characters and settings. Hughes credits von Arnim with that rarity in feminist texts: humor, the humor of von Arnim’s “sustained performance of expatriate identity” (174), which depends partly on the recurrence of German/English puns, the prankishness of her character Elizabeth, and satire applied to both German and English characters. Her ethnoexocentrism also depends on true cultural interminglings as she switches back and forth between focalizations of her English and German characters.In contrast, Vernon Lee wrote in genres that evoke suspense and fear rather than humor. In addition to her travel writing, she wrote ghost tales and supernatural stories, many in the tradition of German fairy tales. Born in France, Lee grew up as “Pan-European, seeing all Europe and especially Western Europe as a single entity” (187). Hughes credits Lee’s choices in genres and modes as one of her transgressions and dissolutions of the limits imposed by borders and boundaries: between genders, nations, and genres.For her concluding chapter, Hughes dwells on Lee’s 1905 novella, felicitously entitled Ottilie, in which a talented woman character surrenders her position at court, two marriages, and any development of her many aptitudes to the demands of her infantile, tyrannical, indifferent brother. Hughes argues that Ottilie, entrapped by male characters, also suffers entrapment at two narrative levels. Her story emerges only through a primary narrator, who also tells the story largely in the brother’s words. Entrapped by both characters and narrative technique, Lee’s title character resembles the Ottilie of Hughes’s chapter 1, the unsung daughter-in-law who facilitated the ethnoexocentrism of Anna Jameson.Like Lee’s character Ottilie, Jameson’s dear friend never published anything, but in her case by choice. Although she composed poetry all her life, none appeared in print until Karsten Hein’s 2001 biography included a number of lyrics and some of her correspondence. According to the coeditor of her multilingual, privately circulated periodical, Das Chaos, von Goethe’s “poetry and prose suggested that she would come to establish a literary reputation” (207). For Hughes, von Goethe’s limited life provides her a “ghostly Ottilie haunting” that brings together two women, one a fictional character, the other an ignored but active participant in German literary culture.Victorian Women Women Writers and the Other Germany carries forth many of the contributions to Victorian scholarship that Hughes has produced nonstop over a stunning career. One of the prominent pioneers of publication/reception/print-culture history, she has pursued close reading of thousands of pages of periodicals, from the stable and prestigious to the fly-by-night. At the same time that she has contributed to canon expansion, she also has produced single-author studies that bring fresh views to Tennyson and Gaskell. Engaging poetry as author of the Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (2019), she writes as handily of dactylic hexameter as of intradiegesis in prose fiction. Hence Hughes’s range of study assures that her book delivers plenteous rewards for scholars of almost any relevant inclination: specialists in one or more of its authors, Victorianists, canon busters, Germanists, publication historians, women’s and gender-studies scholars, and other teachers who can fruitfully mine Hughes’s chapters to freshen many a syllabus.As vividly apparent, Hughes never hesitates to travel for research: to libraries, local and national museums, and homes and haunts frequented by her subjects. Her destinations in the former East Germany demonstrate how traveling Victorianists can gain even more than access to archives from such travel. Dresden museums, for example, house some of the paintings viewed by English women poets abroad as they frequently composed ekphrastic poems based on a single work of art. Explorations of Berlin and Weimar can yield a feeling for the lay of the land and the remaining buildings and gardens, which can lead to captivating descriptive passages. On the other side of the former border, a truly assiduous researcher might experience self-deluge at the seventeen-stage Friederichsbad baths, which George Eliot could have visited when passing through Baden Baden in 1880. And travelers abroad will always discover some quirky out-of-the-way experience beyond or outside of expectations. Consequently, Hughes recommends today’s study-abroad programs for young people poised to follow the examples of travelers such as Amy Levy and Michael Field. Students who study abroad may take some of the opportunities enjoyed by their Victorian predecessors to develop, one hopes, their own versions of ethnoexocentrism.