The publication of Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad in 1834 launched Jameson as an expert on foreign as well as British art, literature, and culture. German culture would also play major roles in her next two books, so that when she helped Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning elope to Italy in 1846 she was known ‘as the author of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) and Social Life in Germany (1840)’.¹ After 1840 her career turned more decidedly to art, first in a series of guides to galleries and then the art books for which she is best known today, Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–52). Jameson’s experiences of Germany and her friendship with Goethe nonetheless informed all her writing from 1834 until her life ended in early 1860, including a brief Athenaeum article in 1859. This chapter surveys Jameson’s German-inspired work as examples of sustained cultural exchange and explores their literary and social impact in nineteenth-century England and continuing relevance; even today Jameson serves as a useful model of how to engage another culture ethically and productively.

Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834)

John R. Davis terms Visits and Sketches the ‘most influential travelogue’ of Germany in the 1830s, especially in opening the richness of German art museums and the ferment of new schools of painting and architecture to British audiences.² The Athenaeum devoted three successive notices to Visits and Sketches in June–July 1834, asserting that the volumes

The Edinburgh Review additionally noted her ‘eloquent and philosophic female criticism’.⁴ Part I, especially the section on Frankfurt, and all of Part II follow the conventions of travel literature, alternating among celebrity accounts, picturesque sights, and guides to art galleries, as would later mass-produced European travel guides and Jameson’s own London gallery guides.⁵

But larger aims also surface. As in Characteristics of Women (1832), Jameson comments on women’s education, but rather than tying this education to women’s roles as ‘mothers and nurses of legislators and statesmen’, as in the earlier book, Visits and Sketches celebrates sociable women for whom exercising intellectual powers is an important end in itself.⁶ In her opening pages Jameson theorises female cosmopolitanism immediately after contrasting the insular, snobbish young Englishwomen on board a steamer, whom she observed travelling under the wing of their equally haughty ‘mamma’, with two young German women.⁷ Superior to the English females in looks and rank, they interact with other passengers, smile at the young Englishmen eager to loan them their telescopes, and freely walk along the deck rather than huddling apart.⁸ The German women, like those on Berlin streets whom Florence Nightingale would observe in 1850, are freer than their English counterparts; more important, they engage in Anglo–German cultural exchange.⁹

Jameson also demonstrates the contrast between openness to difference in cultures and narrow Englishness in herself before and after engaging in Anglo–German sociability. Thus she and her English travelling companion first turned up their noses at what seemed the ‘exceedingly disagreeable’ old city of Cologne with its ‘endless narrow dirty streets, and dull dingy-looking edifices’; but after she met an unnamed friend (Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen), she saw the same city anew, specifically as a sphere of more capaciously conceived female ability and development:

As she later observes of Mertens-Schaaffhausen and Adele Schopenhauer, they are ‘very essentially German: English society and English education would never have produced two such women’. ¹¹

Visits withholds from view until the middle of Book I the woman who lay at the heart of Jameson’s experience of Germany. ‘Goethe and his daughter-in-law’ opens with a deeply contemplative Alda in England whose thoughts are ‘far – very far’ away after reading a passage in Sarah Austin’s Characteristics of Goethe that

On one hand this is celebrity reporting by a privileged insider. But proximity to the daughter-in-law’s arms and lips linked to the passage’s rhythm of rising emotion marks this as highly personal writing too.¹³ Though the passage begins with the greatness of Johann von Goethe, Jameson adroitly adapts his cultural authority as warrants for the highest pinnacle of womanhood Jameson has ever encountered:

Jameson goes on to praise the daughter-in-law’s gift of ‘consummate refinement of thought, and feeling, and expression’ and caps this extended eulogium by enunciating the standard Goethe sets for all educated women: ‘Quick in perception, yet femininely confiding, uniting a sort of restless vivacity with an indolent gracefulness, she appeared to me by far the most poetical and genuine being, of my own sex I ever knew in highly-cultivated life.’¹⁵ Never passive or mute in the presence of genius, the female Goethe clearly possesses a remarkable mind and broad knowledge inseparable from feminine sympathy, affection, and delightful sociability.

Goethe is also, Jameson makes clear, herself a writer – but one whom the public will never be able to read: ‘Of those effusions of her creative and poetical talents, which charm her friends, I say nothing, because in all probability neither you nor the public will ever benefit by them.’¹⁶ When Alda names other talented German women writers who spurn publication, Medon immediately cites the similar report by Abraham Hayward in a recent translation of Faust and quotes Hayward’s hopes that steps might be taken ‘to unlock the stores of fancy and feeling which the Ottilies and the Adèles have hived up’.¹⁷ Jameson is here engaging in intricate intertextuality. On one hand, without herself mentioning the first names of two of her closest German friends, Jameson allows Hayward to do so and also delegates to him regrets about their refusal to publish. On the other hand, in alluding so specifically to Hayward’s second edition, which appeared mere months before Visits was issued, Jameson publicises Goethe’s intellectual status, gives added point to the survey of German women writers that follows her own tribute to Goethe, and engages in self-advertising.¹⁸ For apropos of a commentary on Gretchen in Faust, Hayward devotes a paragraph to Jameson herself:

In alluding to Hayward, Jameson reciprocates Hayward’s advertisement of her yet offers a tacit riposte. Rather than devoting her writing to Johann von Goethe’s fictional women, Jameson surveys living German women authors, making it clear that a number of German women publish, whether Helmina von Chezy, Karoline Pichler, Johanna Schopenhauer, or Fanny Tarnow.²⁰

Hayward concluded his commentary by regretting that ‘little or nothing is known in England of the present state of painting, sculpture and engraving in Germany’, and he again singled out Jameson as peculiarly gifted with the ‘power of making paintings and statues speak to the imagination and understanding through books’, another propitiously timed mention preceding the publication of Visits.²¹ In Visits, Jameson presented a guide to the Glyptothek Museum of ancient sculpture in Munich and to Germany’s most important contemporary artists, amply fulfilling Hayward’s desire. In addition, whenever possible she also mentioned Renaissance and contemporary German women painters, including Madame de Freyburg (an artist and mother), Julie von Egloffstein (an early member of Goethe’s Musenverein), Louise Seidlar (Luise Sidlar in Visits and like Egloffstein a member of Johann von Goethe’s circle, becoming eventual custodian of paintings at the grand ducal court); Mademoiselle de Winkel of Dresden, and Emilie Lachaud de Loqueyssie (whose portraits included miniatures).²²

In these ways Jameson is truly offering an account of Germany and German culture through a female lens. Perhaps most important, she enacts the liberating possibilities of a German milieu for British women by writing a text in which, working out of surroundings afforded by Germany, she appropriates authority as a woman cultural critic. She additionally aligns the qualities needed in an effective cultural critic with those she identifies with affective female cosmopolitanism in her introduction:

True appreciation of painting instead requires ‘[s]ensibility, imagination, and quick perception of form and colour’, ‘power of association’, a ‘mind trained to habitual sympathy with the beautiful and the good’, and ‘knowledge of the meaning, and the comprehension of the object of the artist’.²⁴ Like most nineteenth-century art critics, including Ruskin, she adopts a moral approach (‘the beautiful and the good’), but her additional terms echo those in her introduction: ‘habitual sympathy’, ‘quick perception’, a ‘trained’ mind, and comprehensive ‘knowledge’.²⁵

On the basis of these precepts and her assumption of authority, she does not hesitate to assert cases in which German practices are superior to British. When she examines German art inside the new palace being built for King Ludwig in Munich, for example, and watches painter Julius Schnorr and his assistants working on frescoes based on the Niebelungenlied, she asks,

More than two decades later a plan along these lines would be adopted for the new Houses of Parliament due to a German intervention, Prince Albert’s leadership in directing frescoes that celebrated British cultural heritage including Chaucer and Arthurian legend.²⁷ But if she was receptive to German triumphs, neither did Jameson avoid censuring German faults, as when she criticised the plan to build the monument named Valhalla in the style of a Greek temple.²⁸ She moreover elevated British portraiture over Germany’s:

The high point of Jameson’s representation of female freedoms and opportunities afforded by Germany comes in a passage on the Glyptothek, which she visits on a day set aside for ‘strangers’, or non-residents, and finds herself alone as she walks from gallery to gallery of sculpture. In this passage she first theorises the distinctive quality of the ancient sculptures she observes, namely, their combined ‘presence of thought, and the absence of volition’.³⁰ In an original poem evidently composed in the gallery, she then contrasts and appropriates to herself the union of thought and mobility that characterises literature:

Jameson’s iambic pentameter rhymed couplets and triplets creatively respond to her solitary reflection on sculpture’s relation to humanity, acknowledging the lack of the ideal embodied by sculptures in herself but claiming both thought and volition that statuary lacks. Hers is the utterance of an Englishwoman whose self-reliance rather than relative existence is extended by cultural mobility and culminates in ‘unconquer’d will’, a phrase usually reserved for men. Publicly representing this intensely personal moment also demonstrates to her closest German friends the potential benefits if they would likewise share with women readers and a broader public their poems and contemplative prose. Jameson’s poem is thus the climax of Visits and what it represents. Combined with Jameson’s assertion that in Germany and especially Prussia ‘no where could an unprotected female journey with more complete comfort and security’, Jameson telegraphed to other women the mobility and intellectual promise that Germany offered them too. ³²

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)

When Jameson reluctantly left Germany in 1836 and travelled to England to prepare for a transatlantic journey that took her to her husband in Canada, she could not know that she would also be sailing into Canadian literary history. Jameson is today a minor figure relative to George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, but Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) has remained in print since its first appearance and is a canonical Canadian text.³³ The ‘summer rambles’ of Jameson’s third volume featuring her ‘adoption’ by the Ojibwa (‘Chippewas’ to Jameson) are best known. But according to Alessa Johns and Judith Johnston, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (hereafter WSSR) also has an intimate connection to her experiences in Germany. As Johnston says of WSSR epigraphs taken from German women,

Throughout, WSSR drew upon her German experiences as a woman, intimate friend, thinker, and professional writer.³⁵ Even her openness to ‘Chippewa’ women and cultural difference was shaped in part by Jameson’s prior experience of ethnoexocentrism in Germany. But WSSR extends Jameson’s ethnoexocentrism in its quadrilateral cultural exchange among Britain, Germany, Canada, and the US and invites readers to become equally open to cultural difference.

As Jameson’s preface explains, she wrote WSSR in the form of ‘fragments’ of a journal written to ‘a friend’.³⁶ That friend is clearly Goethe, as a number of passages in Jameson’s three volumes confirm. Early in volume I Jameson, chafing against confinement in Toronto, remarks that ‘Resignation comes in a form which reminds me of Ottilie’s definition – “Resignation, my dear, is only a despair, which does not beat people.”’ Later Jameson asks, ‘Why do you not finish your translation of [Johann von Goethe’s] Egmont? who will ever do it as you can?’, a pointed reference to Goethe’s earlier collaboration with Englishman Charles des Voeux on a translation of Tasso, although the reference was veiled to any readers unfamiliar with Goethe’s role.³⁷ This dear friend likewise hovers in the background of Jameson’s extended discussion of Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (conversations with Goethe), since she had been physically present at many conversations that Eckermann recorded.³⁸

Even when Jameson narrates her adventure in the Canadian west among its First Nations peoples, she suddenly addresses Goethe as ‘you’ and covertly refers to their shared secret of Jameson’s exhaustion in 1835 from tending to Goethe’s infant daughter Anna in Vienna:

In these interwoven references Goethe buckles the German and Canadian parts of WSSR together and gives it such unity as it has.⁴⁰

At one point Jameson compares Eckermann’s book to S. T. Coleridge’s Table Talk, an aside that illuminates the form of Jameson’s own Winter Studies. Insofar as all three works represent mobile intelligences discoursing on varied topics in a sociable context, Jameson’s Winter Studies is an Anglo-German female counterpart to Johann von Goethe’s Conversations and Coleridge’s Table Talk with appeal to German and English readers alike.⁴¹ This generic format clarifies not just her wide-ranging comments on German and Anglophone literature but also the emotional and psychological function of Jameson’s critical commentaries in providing the virtual companionship of the beloved German friend she had so recently left behind. Jameson was ‘accompanied’ by Goethe in her solitary Toronto room in material ways too, since while writing Jameson drew upon the ‘MS notes you were so good as to write me. For the latter I cannot sufficiently thank you, my dear kind friend!’⁴²

Approaching Winter Studies as female-centred conversation gains further credence from the epigraph gracing Jameson’s title page in all three volumes below Jameson’s authorial name: ‘Leid, und Kunst, und Scherz [Sorrow, and Art, and Jest]. / Rahel’’. Jameson’s epigraph derives from the famous German woman conversationalist Rahel Varnhagen von Ense (née Rahel Levin), the Berlin Jewish salonnière who ‘was perceived as a pioneer of women’s intellectual emancipation by her contemporaries, including [Johann von] Goethe [and] Heinrich Heine’. Rahel is by now a key figure in histories of German Jewish life, women writers, and Romanticism.⁴³ But when Winter Studies appeared in November 1838, Rahel was unknown to the British public. As Jameson observes in a footnote, ‘The book of “Rahel” is famous from one end of Germany to the other, but remains, I believe, a sealed fountain still for English readers.’⁴⁴ A month later, Carlyle published the lengthy essay-review ‘Varnhagen Von Ense’s Memoirs’ in the Westminster Review, contending that Rahel was a ‘true genius’ but ‘did not write’.⁴⁵ Carlyle, who would designate the specifically gendered man of letters a modern hero in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic (1841), refused to recognise the over 10,000 private letters from a woman’s pen as writing, despite German opinion to the contrary. As noted earlier, Goethe knew Rahel and in her privately written ‘Für Anna’ declared, ‘The Germans only really gained an appreciation of female genius through Rahel and Bettina [von Armin]. These two women actually brought about the intellectual emancipation of women.’⁴⁶ ‘Rahel’ on the title page of WSSR’s three volumes, then, is a signifier of the female intellectual conversationalist and pays oblique homage both to Rahel and to Goethe, for whom Rahel functioned as a ‘role model’.⁴⁷ The personal significance of the Rahel epigraph – which points to Jameson’s themes of sorrow, art, and lively wit in her three volumes – is even clearer in Jameson’s private letter to Goethe as she prepared to leave for Canada: ‘all things connected with you must go with me. I cannot part with them. And in my cabin I take the Rahel you marked for me, and all the M.S.S. notes which you made for me.’⁴⁸

Though volumes II and III of WSSR are both titled Summer Rambles, volume II is structured to bring German and Canadian cultures together in an Anglo-German textual space. For Jameson takes her German studies with her on the road, associating German studies with physical as well as cultural mobility, modelling for transatlantic Anglophone women the enrichment afforded by international reading and cultural exchange. Rather than a binary between serious winter studies to ward off depression (volume I) and lifted spirits and sociability rekindled with warm weather (volume II), Jameson positions study as a pleasure easily blending with others. Her preliminary expeditions westwards are thus punctuated by comments on Baron Sternberg’s fiction, Schiller’s dramas, and the poet Joseph von Eichendorff.

Only in volume III do German studies largely disappear as she recounts her travels among Canadian and US Indigenes, when she could take no more than her notebooks and sketchbooks – and, I would add, the cultural practices she had acquired in part from her German travels.⁴⁹ Just as personal letters of introduction had facilitated her entry into German circles, so in Canada she likewise relied on a personal network, having met in Toronto Charlotte MacMurray, ‘otherwise O-ge-ne-bu-go-quay, (i.e. the wild rose)’, the biracial wife of Ojibwa descent married to the Christian missionary William MacMurray.⁵⁰ Tellingly, Jameson links the voice of Mrs MacMurray to Goethe’s, thereby connecting both to Jameson’s affective life and to her mobile practice of cultural exchange:

In this trilateral cultural exchange among German, British, and Canadian First Nations women, Jameson exemplifies women’s talent for affective cosmopolitanism due to their ‘kindly affections’ that render them more ‘mobile’ and able to ‘lend’ themselves ‘to different manners and habits’.⁵²

Volume III foregrounds travel writing, enlivened by Jameson’s breathless excitement and delight in her new-found physical mobility, adventurousness, and unprecedented experiences.⁵³ She first visits the American agent and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft and June Johnston Schoolcraft, the pioneering Native American writer and Charlotte MacMurray’s American sister, on Mackinac Island.⁵⁴ With June Schoolcraft, Jameson shares encounters that are more overtly grounded in affect and ready sympathy across difference, as she had in Germany:

As with Goethe, Schoolcraft’s fluent English forms a bridge to her British visitor (as did their shared Christianity), though Jameson has more blind spots than in Europe and reverts to the ‘doomed Indian’ trope identified by Kate Flint when she mentions the melancholy tone of Schoolcraft’s conversation.⁵⁶

Accompanied by Schoolcraft, Jameson next travels to Sault Ste Marie, Canada, to visit Schoolcraft’s mother, a full-blooded ‘Chippewa’ Indian who speaks no English, has never lived among Anglo-Europeans, and has the ‘habits and manners’ of ‘a genuine Indian squaw’.⁵⁷ As Jameson becomes closely acquainted with the mother, however, she presents a less conventional travel account, one that represents receptiveness, adaptability, and ready affection on both sides. On arriving in Sault Ste Marie, for example, Jameson was ill and ‘fevered’, and the mother ‘took me in her arms, laid me down on a couch, and began to rub my feet, soothing and caressing me. She called me Nindannis, daughter, and I called her Neengai, mother, (though how different from my own fair mother, I thought, as I looked up gratefully in her dark Indian face!).’⁵⁸ Jameson responds to the opportunity to enter another culture by immediately studying her host culture’s language, though with perhaps more limited success than in Germany: ‘My attempts to speak Indian caused, of course, considerable amusement; if I do not make progress, it will not be for want of teaching and teachers.’⁵⁹

As numerous scholars observe, Jameson also begins to adopt subject positions unusual for a European woman.⁶⁰ To give one example of many, she revises prevailing notions of cultural superiority in warfare after comparing the history of rape among Indian, Teutonic, and Latin nations (to the detriment of the last):

Becoming ‘the first European female who had ever’ shot the rapids in a canoe, she is then adopted by her hosts, a more formal marker of entrance into another culture than she had experienced in Germany: ‘I was … adopted into the family by the name of Wah,sàh,ge,wah,nó,quà. … the bright foam, or more properly, with the feminine adjunct qua, the woman of the bright foam; and by this name I am henceforth to be known among the Chippewas.’⁶²

As in almost all her works, Jameson integrates discussion of women’s social position into her subject matter, here within a hybrid cultural framework.⁶³ For in concluding her account of the Ojibwa, Jameson attempts to view the condition of women from both a First Nations and a European perspective:

Reading volume III of WSSR in tandem with Visits and Sketches and awareness of Jameson’s personal letters clarifies how pervasively Jameson’s earlier German experiences prepared for and inform WSSR, even as her Canadian rambles extended her receptivity to a culture much different from any she had previously known. Together, these first two German books offer important representations of nineteenth-century women’s transnational practice of ethnoexocentrism that contributed to women’s social and intellectual empowerment in Jameson’s time and that enhance understanding of transnational possibilities past and present.

Social Life in Germany (1840)

In February 1837, while still in North America, Jameson told Goethe that she had read ‘all your notes on the [plays of ] the P[rincess] Amelia’ and asked, ‘can you give me an analysis of those I have not seen’.⁶⁵ By late November 1838, now back in London, Jameson had decided ‘to translate the Princess Amelia’s dramas into English’ and asked Goethe, ‘Pray … get for me any information about them you can. I want the dates of their first appearance, … and in short any particulars about them and the sensation they have caused and the manner in which they have been played in Germany.’⁶⁶ Having spent almost two years in North America, Jameson still turned towards her second home in Germany. Her letter clarifies to what degree Social Life in Germany, like Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, was a collaboration with Goethe, whose book it was as well: ‘I shall give a selection, not for their excellence, but those which you recommend as true to German social life.’⁶⁷

The result was a decidedly Anglo-German book, one titled to take advantage of the current publishing market. Jameson did not title hers a translation but (in full) Social Life in Germany, Illustrated in the Acted Dramas of Her Royal Highness the Princess Amelia of Saxony. Her title implicitly echoed that of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, an enormous transatlantic publishing success of 1837.⁶⁸ Jameson knew Martineau; as she commented to Goethe in August 1836, shortly before leaving for Canada, ‘Miss Martineau has returned from America, and when I can find time I shall run and see her.’⁶⁹ Taking advantage of audience interest in social analysis created by Martineau, Jameson proceeded similarly but less systematically in Social Life to provide a picture of middle-class life in northern Germany seen from the inside. Judith Johnston in fact asserts that Social Life is more ‘sociological’ than literary.⁷⁰

Jameson also enhanced the commercial appeal of Social Life by calibrating its release date. On 9 February 1840, an advert in the Examiner announced, ‘Mrs. Jameson’s New Work. / Now ready’, giving its full title and appending this quote from Jameson’s preface: ‘A Royal lady on [sic] this our Nineteenth Century has stepped from her Palace into the arena of literature, and has written very beautifully for her own sex and for her own people.’⁷¹ The next day, 10 February 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg in the Chapel Royal, St James. Here, then, was a German-generated publishing opportunity that extended both Jameson’s readership and British interest in Germany. One of the plays Jameson translated not only came from the pen of a distant relative of the prince (both he and Princess Amalia were descendants of the House of Wettin) but also illuminated his background. For The Princely Bride (Die Fürstenbraut) was based on a royal author’s immediate experience of the ‘court of a petty prince,’ the social milieu of Albert’s rearing, and gave a royal insider’s view:

In the play the royal title character arrives for the royal wedding. Perhaps Jameson hoped that readers would see in the sterling character of her protagonist the qualities of England’s new Anglo-German prince. The Princess is self-effacing, loving, wise, and steadfast in duty to the point of assuming blame for breaking off the royal wedding when she realises the deception practiced on the bridegroom (and herself) when her lady in waiting was passed off as the Princess when the affianced prince had earlier visited in disguise. Having fallen in love with him through his letters, the Princess plainly sees her intended bridegroom’s shock and recoil on her arrival. Eventually the prince sees his affianced princess’s virtues and determines to marry her after all. She assents, disillusioned but determined to do her duty to her father and abide by the dictates of her royal role.

Jameson’s introduction to the play dourly paints the life that awaits her, one that she will pass on to her children in turn:

Jameson’s Athenaeum reviewer saw the immediate relevance of this play in giving a ‘glimpse into one nook of the world in Germany, which the events of the hour make a more than usually interesting object of contemplation to all British subjects’, adding, ‘Let us hope that something more of reciprocal obligation, of hearty affection, than is displayed in this melancholy sketch of the destiny of a German princess, may enter into the story of the married life of a German prince!’⁷⁴

The Athenaeum saw more in Social Life than an opportune commercial publication, however, revealing how well Jameson had solidified her position as a writer of distinction by 1840:

The glum forecast of the royal princess’s future also tacitly warned young Englishwomen brought up never to question the roles they inherited of possible disappointments in marriage. Unsurprisingly, Judith Johnston and others have focused principally on feminist commentary in Social Life. As always Jameson carefully hedged her assertiveness, underscoring that she was not rejecting women’s traditional roles as wife and mother or disputing men’s claims to the public sphere of politics and governance. Still, it is in this book that she first publicly states a feminist credo through her mouthpiece Alda in another dialogue with Medon:

Social Life shares elements of a conduct book with Characteristics of Women, but Jameson draws on female life in Germany rather than Shakespeare to model proto-feminist conduct. As in Characteristics, notably, Jameson again placed her dedication in a visual frame of her own devising (see Figure 2.1), not to single out a beloved friend this time, but to address a community of young Englishwomen whose lives and sense of female possibility she hoped to improve by showing important cultural alternatives to life as her middle-class readers knew it.

Figure 2.1. Dedication page, Social Life in Germany (1840), illustration and text by Anna Jameson.

Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The dedication necessarily stressed moral probity as well as the German author’s refined taste, since in the notes (often silently contributed by Goethe) Jameson presented female models that were highly unconventional in England at the time. Fifteen years after Social Life, Marian Evans would inform Fraser’s readers that women thought nothing of attending theatre by themselves in Weimar – a startling behaviour even then.⁷⁷ Jameson conveyed the point in 1840 in a note to the first play, Falsehood and Truth (Lüge und Wahrheit): ‘in the small towns, where every one is known, young ladies may be seen alone at the theatre without any impropriety. The beautiful little theatre at Weimar is in this respect like a family drawing-room.’ In the introduction to The Uncle (Der Oheim), she reiterated, ‘in the north of Germany, as Weimar, Cobourg, Stettin, Dessau, &c., … a young lady, rich, noble, and beautiful, might put on her bonnet and walk through the streets unattended, with perfect propriety’.⁷⁸

Besides modelling physical and social mobility for women, she was also suggesting revised courtship practices. Her explanation of the Verlobung or formal engagement ceremony in her introduction to The Young Ward (Der Zögling) underscored the importance of an engaged couple’s getting to know each other before they married, a practice that in Germany sometimes led to a broken engagement with no blame assigned to either party.⁷⁹ More daringly, Jameson explained in reference to the play’s mention of divorce that in Protestant Germany, divorce could be both ethical and justifiable, since in Saxony divorce did not imply the wife’s impropriety, the sole ground on which an Englishman could then sue for divorce: ‘the legal pleas for divorce are several; viz. 1. The proved infidelity of either party … 2. Bigamy on either side. 3. Desertion of home … by either party’.⁸⁰ The repetition of ‘either’ highlighted the equality of German men and women before the law, an indirect endorsement of English equality of the sexes at home. She then added (in addition to outright crimes against a spouse) ‘4. Quasi-desertion; that is … when the husband and wife have agreed to be separated for life without other cause than mutual aversion, disparity of temper or character &c.; and coercive measures have been tried, or apparently tried, without result’.⁸¹ If Henriette von Pogwisch had divorced her husband on precisely these grounds after their lengthy separation (see Chapter 1), Jameson, now legally and permanently separated from the man with whom she could not live amicably, may have been telegraphing a message to him in Canada through the public medium of print. In Germany Jameson could have divorced him (especially after he began an affair in Canada in subsequent years); as an Englishwoman she was forced to remain tethered to him and depend only on his good will to fulfil the promise of leaving her his money at the time of death (which he did not do). Without ever saying so directly, she demonstrated by looking at German models that divorce on the grounds of incompatibility was a morally upright position – a common enough assumption in the twentieth century but rarely articulated in English writing by men or women until then.

In one other important respect Social Life addressed female community on a larger scale, for it was the earliest of Jameson’s extended discussions of secular sisterhoods at a time when these were unfamiliar; indeed, it would be five years before the first Anglican sisterhood was founded in London.⁸² The discussion surfaced because the ‘princely bride’ speaks of taking shelter temporarily in a convent, and Jameson wanted to indicate that the princess refers not to a nunnery but to a Damenstift, one of numerous lay-convents endowed for unmarried noblewomen. Jameson already knew a little of Damenstifte through Goethe’s younger sister Ulrike, whose name had been entered as a candidate for a Damenstift in the St Johannis-Kloster in Schleswig in 1807.⁸³ That the topic meant more than mere information to Jameson, however, is evidenced by her returning to these institutions again in her books of 1855 and 1856 and in one of her last periodical articles. Their interest for Jameson once again lay in their feminist implications:

She concluded by singling out an Anglo-German Stift founded in 1829 by the British Hanoverian king George IV designed to assist daughters of men who had served the Hanoverian state; these did not require noble birth.⁸⁵ The idea of secular residences for women associated with civil service contributions would become a keynote of her discussions of Stifte in 1855.

Jameson gleefully wrote to Goethe on 3 March 1840, ‘My translation of the Princess’s drama is published and has great success, more than I hoped. I have seen ten reviews of it, and all most favourable.’⁸⁶ Jameson hoped that she and Goethe could collaborate again, and suggested a series of biographies of women artists and ‘their social position philosophically and morally considered’.⁸⁷ But when Goethe failed to respond to this or other suggested collaborations, Jameson instead concentrated her energies on art criticism for the next twelve years, beginning with gallery guides for London and culminating in her best-known work today, Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–52). Jameson and Goethe continued to correspond regularly and visit at intervals, but Jameson would publish no more books specifically focused on Germany. Yet Germany would never entirely disappear as a reference point for her.

Female Communities at Home and Abroad

Jameson’s writings about female communities in the 1850s are her most overtly feminist. She had always urged the vital importance of women’s education and educational access. Turning sixty in 1854 seemed to free her to speak more openly, even though she continued to calibrate her feminism for public consumption, maintaining distance on ‘women’s rights’ and repeatedly affirming respect for men.⁸⁸ Nonetheless, she increased her advocacy for access to paid employment for middle-class women and better wages for working-class women so that all could achieve independence and maintain themselves decently. She also stressed men’s and women’s interdependence in a ‘communion of labour’, which entailed public recognition of women’s integral role in the larger society as well.

Two factors supported her activism: her increasing interactions with a network of younger women in the Langham Place Group, and the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, founded in 1857, which featured rational, evidence-based discourse at mixed-sex meetings in which women as well as men were welcome to speak publicly – one of the first British organisations to follow this policy.⁸⁹ Such public validation of women in their intellectual and sociable capacities provided female experiences in England akin to those Jameson had so eagerly sought in Germany two decades earlier.

Several of the younger women whom Jameson called her ‘nieces’ also had ties to Germany.⁹⁰ As Chapter 3 details, Anna Mary Howitt developed fluent German from living in Heidelberg with her parents William and Mary as a teenager; she returned to Munich as an aspiring artist in 1850 to study art and published An Art Student in Munich in 1853. In Germany she was visited by her friend, painter Barbara Leigh Smith, later Bodichon, an integral member of the Langham Place Group. And Bodichon introduced Anna Mary to Bessie Rayner Parkes, another Langham Place Group leader to whom, according to Clara Thomas, Jameson suggested the founding of the English Woman’s Journal.⁹¹

Thomas draws a direct line from Jameson’s assertion of the fundamental equality of women and men in Social Life to her last two books published in her lifetime: Sisters of Charity Catholic and Protestant, Abroad and at Home (1855) and The Communion of Labour (1856), both of which began as private lectures given in the home of Elizabeth Jesser Reid in Regent’s Park.⁹² Johnston gives an important analysis of these two works’ roots in English feminism and feminist networks. But the first of these, Sisters of Charity, is also a late ‘Germany’ book given Jameson’s attention to German women’s employment in hospitals, prisons, and charitable institutions. As always, Jameson shrewdly timed the release of her book: Florence Nightingale and her female nurses, several drawn from Catholic and Anglican sisterhoods, were in the Crimea and becoming famous at the very moment Jameson was lecturing and publishing. Nightingale was herself intimately tied to Germany through her training in Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf. In her preface to Sisters of Charity Jameson acknowledged her indebtedness to the pamphlet ‘“Kaiserswerth on the Rhine” (published by Hookham)’; in the text proper she devoted some eight pages to the Kaiserswerth hospital founded by Protestant pastor Theodor Fliedner and his wife, then drew out its immediate relevance: ‘Let me add, for it is a matter of interest at the present, that Miss Florence Nightingale went through a regular course of training at Kaiserswerth, before she took charge of the Female Sanitarium in London.’⁹³ The anonymous ‘Kaiserswerth’ pamphlet Jameson cites in her preface was in fact written by Nightingale, as Jameson likely knew.⁹⁴

Jameson also referenced the German Ursulines, secular schools, reformed prisons, and Kaiserswerth when noting attempts to found similar facilities in England.⁹⁵ And she describes in detail a Viennese hospital run by Elizabethan Sisters:

In 1855, however, Jameson’s reportage was transnational, and sisterhoods in France and Italy were equally crucial in helping Jameson make the case that providing public, socially productive work for women (salaried or accompanied by residential support) was both feasible and desirable.

Jameson’s next lecture and book, The Communion of Labour, was more strictly English in focus. But as she revised both her published lectures for an ‘Enlarged and Improved edition with a Prefatory Letter to The Right Hon. Lord John Russell, President of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science on the Present Condition and Requirement of the Women of England’, she hoped to include the subject of Damenstifte, the German female communities she first described in the Social Life notes to The Princely Bride. She asked Goethe for more details about these on 8 March 1856: ‘my letter, containing a long list of questions relative to the government of the Stifter – remains without any reply & as I promised to give some information, I have felt uncomfortable not to do so – I wish I could be present at the ceremony of your Sister entering the Stift – but wishes and plans seem to be equally in vain’.⁹⁷ Two months later she wrote to thank Goethe for details received, and in November 1857 made explicit that her queries related to her plans for the new edition of her lectures: ‘I am going to publish a new edition of the Sisters of Charity and the Communion of Labour. The question has made such great progress in England that I must make alterations. I wish I could give some good account of the German Stifter.’⁹⁸

Jameson’s feminist activism and long connection with Germany coalesced in her final German writing, a letter signed ‘A. J.’ and titled ‘The Damen-Stifter in Germany’ published in the Athenaeum on 1 January 1859, fifteen months prior to her death. It was also her final collaboration with Goethe, or at least a Goethe family member. Goethe was in Venice at the time and could not lay her hands on all the answers to questions that Jameson posed – everything from the precise numbers of Damenstifte in various German states to sources of funding required or numbers of residents in the largest and smallest. So she delegated her elder son Walther to compile a list and send it directly to Jameson.⁹⁹

In her Athenaeum letter, as in so much of her writing, Jameson carefully inserted the timely relevance of her publication and a prominent man’s endorsement of her position:

Anticipating potential religious anxiety among Athenaeum readers, she also underscored the Protestantism of most German Stifte: ‘Many of these institutions date from the Reformation, and, so far as I can understand, they are more numerous in the Protestant than in the Catholic states.’ She further enhanced her letter’s timeliness by reporting a new Stift founded in Weimar by the Dowager Grand Duchess, adapting its details to her feminist ends. For she followed with a succession of important roles played by Weimar’s Grand Duchesses, who endowed philanthropies and initiated building projects, and the Duchess Louisa, who saved Weimar after Napoleon’s victory at Jena. The tacit argument here was that women could govern and improve the well-being of their societies through their efforts. Jameson shrewdly drew the German women into even closer relation with Englishwomen by noting the marriage of Victoria, Princess Royal, to the Grand Duchess’s grandson – clearly implying that England should follow Germany in endowing similar women’s philanthropic communities in England.¹⁰¹

Though only a minor publication, this public letter was in some ways a fitting climax to Jameson’s explorations of Germany through a female lens: it involved female networks, reflected her longstanding tie to Weimar, reinforced her deep commitment to reforming women’s social and intellectual positions, and above all registered her intimate friendship with Goethe that spilled over into collaborative publications as well as letters. Jameson was presumably planning to contribute to the upcoming special number of English Woman’s Journal devoted to Stifte, but this never materialised. Instead, a week after Jameson’s Athenaeum letter appeared, a riposte appeared in the form of another Athenaeum letter from S. A. – possibly Sarah Austin, long an English authority on German culture and the early friend of both Jameson and Goethe. S. A. publicly impugned Jameson’s assertions about Stifte, bringing Jameson’s authority into question.¹⁰² Jameson left no record of her response to this embarrassing repudiation and exposure even of her errors in forming German plurals. Jameson’s silence on Stifte afterwards tacitly conceded the victory to her opponent.

This reversal resulting from implicit trust in all that Goethe sent, however, was also the consequence of one of the best things she had enjoyed in her busy life and career, her loving friendship with Goethe. Months after ‘Damen-Stifter’ appeared in the Athenaeum, Jameson again paid an extended visit to Goethe (noted in Chapter 1). Considering that Jameson died so quickly after contracting pneumonia in March 1860, her last hurrah of writing about German female communities and visit with Goethe in 1859 comprise a meaningful coda to Jameson’s pioneering female cosmopolitanism and ethnoexocentrism, her embodied practice of Anglo-German cultural exchange in public and private writings, and, not least for a professional woman writer, an opportunity to earn a living by sharing her observations of Germany through a female lens.