Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 by Alessa Johns (review)

The basic premise of Alessa Johns's book—that British and German feminists from 1750 to 1837 played a large role in expanding routes of cultural transfer and therefore presented new perspectives on individual freedoms, national characteristics, and international exchange—hinges on recent theoretical concepts of globalism and cosmopolitanism. Scholarship on women's multifaceted involvement in the literary market from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries has occupied feminist research since the 1970s. Prolific studies about the works, lives, and milieus of German-speaking women such as Sophie von La Roche, Bettina von Arnim, Sophie Mereau, Rahel Varnhagen, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, and Dorothea Schlegel, among many others, have bolstered these females' ranks in the canon. The international networks that women fostered through salons, reading circles, and social engagements have also gained wide recognition. Thus, upon first reading the book's title and understanding its argument, one wonders what unique views and information the study might hold.

Upon closer reading, however, one finds that Johns's conceptual framework does bring a refreshingly new perspective to literary studies of this era. First, investigations into theories of cultural transfer have generally focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Johns validly argues for extending these concepts back to when the kings of England were concurrently electors of Hanover. Second, books about the Personal Union have usually examined high political and diplomatic history. In contrast, Johns investigates sociocultural arenas. Third, Johns does not concentrate solely on females, but rather views males as contributors to a feminist and gendered historical account. Fourth, rather than seeing the actions and works of the cultural figures as purely nationalist or internationalist, Johns seeks to convey a more nuanced viewpoint with elements of both.

In four chapters, Johns looks specifically at book publishers (primarily Anna Vandenhoeck), book collectors (primarily Philippine Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel), translators (primarily Johann David Michaelis, Therese Heyne, Meta Forkel, Philippine Gatterer Engelhard, Mary Wollstonecraft, Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, and Joseph Johnson), and travel writers and artists (especially those who represented Vesuvius's eruption). While the growth of the book trade was essential for forming national identities, as Johns concurs with Benedict Anderson, women's involvement in broader cultural movements simultaneously fostered pragmatic internationalism. Regarding the booming translation industry of the time, Johns depicts translations as moving beyond individual or national agendas to become part of larger networks. Travel writing, too, helped transcend any troubles that individuals and nations might have experienced from political upheavals to envision alternative ways of being. In representations of Vesuvius, Johns sees a gendered discourse: whereas men generally grasped for the romantic sublime, women opted for a more realistic view of the volcano's threat, indicating Europe's increasing militarism, masculinity, and natural disasters.

The fourth chapter concentrates on British-Irish travel writer Anna Jameson and her accounts of Canadian life, thus bringing the British-German cultural transfer into a larger geographical arena. Jameson had traveled extensively to Germany in the 1830s and published her accounts in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834). She admired what she viewed as less constrictive gender roles for women in Germany than in Great Britain. While living in Canada—against her own volition because her husband had summoned her there to demonstrate marital stability in his bid for a promotion in his job as a legal envoy—Anna Jameson examined inhumane governmental policies against the First Nations people. She saw parallels between the exploitation of First Nations people and the status of European and settler women. Gender and race became intertwined as she viewed the "woman question" as a "human-question" (150). This transnational, antinational viewpoint, however, as Johns stresses, prevented Jameson from becoming a canonized writer. In an afterword, Johns then connects Bruno Latour's theories on actor networks with the cultural figures she has examined, adding another "actor," Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, who created the "Garden Kingdom of...