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  • The Horror and the Pleasure of Un-English Fiction:Ida von Hahn-Hahn and Fanny Lewald in England
  • Gisela Argyle (bio)

In 1846 and 1850, respectively, two German women novelists, Ida von Hahn-Hahn and Fanny Lewald, were lionized in London literary society. Their hosts, fellow guests, and others (for instance, Monckton Milnes, the Carlyles, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning) recorded their impressions and judgments in letters and diaries. Yet these German novelists' names do not appear in any of the major comprehensive English accounts of the theory and practice of early Victorian fiction, whether nineteenth-century or modern. When foreign authors or works do appear in English accounts that are based on a national conception of literature, they are from a small selection of the usual suspects, namely, Goethe, George Sand, Balzac, and Tolstoy. This insularity does not fairly represent the lively critical and creative response at the time to foreign publications.

In a recent "Forum on Transnationalism" in Victorian Studies, Sharon Marcus advocates "comparative approaches informed by transnationalism's inherent historicism [which pays] more attention to genre-formation as a process." Although transnational literary studies have typically treated the asymmetrical power relations belonging to postcolonialism and globalization, their transnational historicizing approach has also "transformed comparative literature, even for those who do not study empire."1 A recent example is The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever. As the allusive title indicates, the essays focus, as does the "Forum on Transnationalism," on links between Britain and France: "The modern novel [. . .] developed through intersections and interactions among texts, readers, writers, and publishing and critical institutions that linked together Britain and France. These intersections [End Page 144] constitute a distinctive arena of cultural power that we call a zone."2 Their choice of countries follows Franco Moretti's quantifying determinations of three "take-offs" in the rise of the European novel, "[w]ith France and Britain always in the core."3 Germany is counted as the third country in the first take-off in the eighteenth century. German-English cultural relations constitute another major "zone." Throughout the nineteenth century comparisons with, projections onto, and "othering" of the "German cousin" included German fiction.4 A transnational approach is well suited to the present study since the cultural power relations between England and Germany at the time were indeed asymmetrical—"Germany" in this usage denoting German-speaking countries rather than a nation-state with a capital city and centralized institutions. The difference was frequently commented on by English critics and deplored by German authors, and is well illustrated by the importance of London for the present study in contrast with the widely distributed German cities important in the two authors' professional careers. By adopting a transnational perspective and thereby bringing the international practices of the authors' time into focus, this reception study complicates conventional national as well as cross-Channel accounts of the generic formation of fiction in England.

As an instructive example of a "thicker" record and its bearing on early Victorian discussions on gender and genre, I shall examine here the English reception of Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805–80) and Fanny Lewald (1811–89). At home each author was praised and decried as a German George Sand, and both were associated with the radical Young Germany and the Vormärz authors (pre-1848 Revolution). Both women lived unconventional, even scandalous, lives as professional authors in illicit unions. Likewise, both women's novels criticized patriarchal gender barriers and portrayed their heroines' emancipatory aspirations sympathetically. However, the Countess Hahn-Hahn's literary sympathies were limited to the plight of upper-class women's trivial and thus unfulfilled lives (similar to Florence Nightingale's protest in Cassandra), whereas Fanny Lewald, daughter of an assimilated German-Jewish merchant, extended her championship of women's emancipation to socialist ideas concerning class, as well as to Jewish emancipation. Their prominence in the German literary scene made them rivals to the point that Lewald published a parody of a typical Hahn-Hahn novel, which was also relished in England.

"The present is the moment for foreign novels," began a review of Hahn-Hahn's novel...

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