Popular Fiction in the Age of Bismarck: E. Marlitt and her Narrative Strategies by Terrill John May (review)

The first work of E. Marlitt (pseudonym for Eugenie John) was published 150 years ago. For the next few decades her works were among the most widely read in Germany. Since they first appeared on the literary marketplace, both the figure of Marlitt and her literary works have been the subject of an aesthetic, political, social, and even moral tug of war. Marlitt found a supportive editor in Ernst Keil, publisher of Die Gartenlaube, where her works first appeared in serialized form. Through that venue she gained a large, enthusiastic, and loyal following of readers. But she also had skeptical reviewers. A hundred years later, when the author and her works attracted the attention of post-war academic critics the same kind of battle lines emerged. While literary histories, if they mentioned Marlitt at all, tended to categorize her work as sub-standard in aesthetic terms, other scholars began to see in her popularity a medium for accessing and understanding seminal issues about mainstream nineteenth-century German society. The interest crossed national borders. It was true among 1970s researchers of Trivialliteratur in Germany as well as of an American-based cultural historian such as George Mosse. In the following decades some feminists discovered in Marlitt an early spokesperson for women’s independence and defender of the oppressed, while others saw politically regressive representations of women in her heroines who invariably, at the end, retreated to the security of marriage. Throughout the intervening century and a half, biographies of the author have repeatedly appeared that cater to fans who have sought to understand the connections between the author’s life and her stories and heroines.

Now a new book-length study by Terrill John May has come out that promises to add to our understanding of Marlitt and her work. Its title, Popular Fiction in the Age of Bismarck: E. Marlitt and her Narrative Strategies, is promising and suggestive in three regards. It purports to address the operations of what makes works popular, to connect the creation and success of Marlitt’s novels to the era of Bismarckian Germany, and to explore the way these works achieve this narratively. To do so May begins with an introduction to the history of Marlitt scholarship, presenting a cogent overview of the various trends and developments, including the most recent work such as Erika Dingeldey’s feminist assessment of Marlitt from 2007 (ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 100.1, Spring 2008, 154–156) and a 2012 Humboldt University dissertation by Tobias Klein, which May praises, but with which he also takes issue, in particular Klein’s insistence on Marlitt’s cultural conservatism. By contrast, May presents ample evidence of Marlitt’s and her heroines’ dedication to liberal ideals and reform. May’s various chapters also incorporate recent publications on gender, on nineteenth-century women’s writing, and on Die Gartenlaube, the influential family magazine that provided Marlitt her route to publishing success.

May’s bibliography even includes a list of Marlitt works that have been filmed, although these films do not play a role in his argument. Beyond May’s initial “note on sources,” he does not include a comprehensive list of Marlitt editions, something that, given the initial serialization of her works and the later plethora of abridged editions, would be useful for other scholars who might choose to work on other aspects of her œuvre, including the issue of contextualized serialization or the history of her later reception.

The strength and greatest contribution of May’s book are the historical connections he draws between many of Marlitt’s works and social, political, and institutional innovations of her day. These passages bring new evidence to bear not only on her political and social orientation, but also on the construction of Marlitt’s novels and the way contemporary readers might have read her work. This includes May’s discussion of “industrial...