This appealing and original book offers an illuminating approach to intercultural exchange during the Enlightenment. By focusing on networks of relationship and translation, Alessa Johns is able to expand and deepen traditional views of the era. She shows how, in their activities as both mediators and creators, “bluestocking” women—i.e., intellectual and literary ladies—were deeply engaged in cultural change. The book's main focus is on exchanges between Britain and Germany, but Johns's arguments have broader implications because they move beyond traditional authorship and publication as measures of cultural significance.
The book's innovative structure and method are among its many strengths. In the author's feminist approach to studying cultural transfer, she musters a range of conceptual tools: from the Annales idea of terrains vastes to sociological actor-network theory. The individual chapters offer interlacing case studies to examine different aspects of her theme. At the same time, they move in rough chronology from the eighteenth into the early nineteenth century, across many geographical spaces, and through the lives of many individuals. Each chapter takes the reader into a detailed exploration of ideas and relationships, yet is inventively different in theme and scope.
Johns begins with the book market: the production, exchange, and collection of books as physical objects, but also the complex relationships among authors, publishers, and audiences. She shows how the activities of publisher Anna Vandenhoeck and the Anglophile university circles of Göttingen created spaces for women's engagement in intellectual pursuits. The cosmopolitan book collecting of Philippine Charlotte of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, for example, promoted both internationalism and national self-consciousness.
German enthusiasm for English literature, and for the novel as a vehicle for feminine sensibility, was not at all limited to women. Johns sees the translation of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa by the Göttingen professor Johann David Michaelis as a significant turning point that stimulated the further spread of protofeminist ideas. She follows the relationships between female translators and their male publishers in the paired cases of Meta Forkel and Georg Forster in Germany, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Johnson in England. Both women lived highly unconventional lives and used their authorship and translation activities to promote radical ideas of liberty. Johns then expands from translation into travel as a vector of cultural transfer, offering a fascinating analysis of representations of Vesuvius—a culminating point on the grand tour of prosperous Europeans, but one experienced very differently by women and men. Johns argues that during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, male perceptions of the volcano as stimulating and sublime were attuned to a romanticized yet militarized masculinity that saw the mountain as a challenge to be conquered. Women, she finds, were not swept up in this enthusiasm and were thus more likely to distance themselves from the experience of seeing the volcano.
The final chapter focuses on one intrepid traveler, the prolific author and translator Anna Jameson, whom Johns seeks to reclaim for feminism and progressive ideas. Jameson was a tireless observer in her travels across Europe and Canada. Not content with hearsay, she interviewed Native Americans and others she saw as oppressed. Jameson is often considered conservative, but Johns points to her calls for reform, particularly in the cause of women. Her sojourns in Germany and her other travels, Johns shows, gave her perspectives she could never have gained in a more sedentary life.
Though there is much to be learned from this study, it does have a few weaknesses. The “Personal Union” of German and British royal houses is not an especially helpful frame—not least because it began in 1714, well before the period of study. And cultural transfer could happen freely without it, of course: French novels were so common in England that they were blamed for general moral corruption among young English ladies. Some portions of the analysis are opaque in ways that could have been clarified by better editing. Johns claims, for example, that Wollstonecraft's portrayal of an all-wise mother figure undermines her revolutionary feminism—but Johns does not fully explain her reasoning. One gradually gets the impression that she is referring obliquely to an argument made later—that domestication and privatization limited women's influence and led to the devaluation of their work—but the dots could have been better connected.
This book will be valuable to scholars in the fields of history, literary criticism, and cultural studies. The author sheds light on little-known byways and brings stimulating ideas to more familiar ground. In the process, she makes a strong case that women's activities mattered—not just to them and to feminists, but in shaping larger cultural patterns. Her imaginative reframing of the problems of women's history and cultural history will likely inspire other scholars to employ similar methods in an effort to forge paths into the less-traveled terrain of culture.
