The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Werther's English Sisters 1785-1805

SYNDY McMILLEN CONGER The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Werther's English Sisters 1785-1805 ι IN AUSTEN'S "Love and Friendship" (ca. 1792), a dubious heroine named Laura disparages a friend's fiancé on startling grounds: for not having read and imitated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Laura's criterion of excellence not only identifies her as a late-century English devotee of sensibility but also demonstrates how such devotees received Werther. They welcomed the novel as nothing less than a "catechism of sensibility,"1 a handbook for the sensitive heart, and its hero as the measure of all men. Austen's parody is also one of the best-known reminders of a fact of literary history long overlooked: that there were many "Lauras," many feminine admirers of Werther, in England in the 1780s and 90s.2 Since by the time Werther became available in English translation (1779), sensibility and its literature had long since come under the guardianship of women,3 it is hardly surprising that women took note of the new German hero of sensibility. They did so, moreover, in unparalleled numbers: no other single German book of the age ever again inspired so many feminine voices. Well over a dozen women poets, songwriters, and novelists pondered the fates of Charlotte and Werther in print: in addition to Austen, Anne Bannerman, Lady Sophia Burrell, Mrs. Sarah Farrell, Anne Francis, Anne Harrison, Barbara Hoole, Mrs. Horrel, Mrs. Hughes, Maria Montolieu, Amelia Pickering, Mary Robinson, Olivia Serres, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Tomlins, and Lady Eglantine Wallace.4 It is the primary purpose of this essay to attend carefully, for the first time, to what these voices were saying. At least two major benefits can accrue from such an investigation. First of all, 22 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA of course, it can extend the picture of Werther's early fortunes in England to include a number of hitherto neglected middle-level readers: educated recipients, in this case women, capable of moderately sophisticated responses. Reception aesthetician Hans Robert Jauß has recently stressed the crucial role of such readers in the reception process. Since they are often widely read poets, critics, and anthologizers, they have the power either to censor or institutionalize the avant-garde performances of their day. They "intercept the norm-shattering power" of such literary works and press them, through revision, into the service of norm creation, or even norm fulfillment.5 Werther's particularly welldocumented reception offers an exceptional opportunity to study these mediating forces in action. Such study invariably discovers, through the eyes of Goethe's contemporaries, elements in Werther that the twentieth century had neglected: aesthetic, religious, or political implications, for example, that enrich the story.6 At the same time, however, it acquaints modern critics with another "mediating, long-forgotten element in literary history," the reader.7 In either case, such study takes the pulse of an age, revealing its preferences and its sensitivities, its dreams and its fears. Women readers in the eighteenth century have been especially neglected, yet were a very active group. Their contribution to significant shifts in eighteenthcentury literature and culture—their feminization of both, and their role in the rise of the novel—are freely enough acknowledged now, but investigation remains laborious because documents are sparse and seldom reprinted.8 The ample feminine tributes to Werther are all the more precious because literary women in the eighteenth century were very often extraordinarily reserved. Aware of the taint of impropriety that still attached to women writers, their characteristic mode of communication was indirection.9 What they had to say on any subject was very apt to be said only under the cover of fiction or of a commentary on someone else's life or fiction. Much of the documentary evidence in this study suggests that, despite a variety of approaches, interests, and talents, what they had to say about Werther was, to a notable degree, unique to them: they read it for their own purposes and with their own criteria. The brief review of the larger reception picture that immediately follows is included to highlight the originality of their contribution. In general, the publication of Werther was a...