Introduction
One of the most curious items in the vast collection of personal papers of the Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) that are kept by the Bodleian Library is a notebook from 1842, which, in many ways, is a remarkable document of personal and professional stock-taking, image-making, and self-affirmation. Among the long lists of historical figures and contemporaries that had caught Disraeli’s imagination, and randomly jotted-down thoughts on character, influence, heroism, and power, the following line stands out: “Fame & Obscurity: two men sighing for each [other].”Footnote 1 Written by someone who had been sounding out multiple routes toward renown and recognition ever since the mid-1820s, it encapsulates the quandary that lies at the heart of the desire for public visibility and the awareness of its potential pitfalls. Intriguingly, when these two sides of the same coin are personified, they inadvertently emphasize the gendered dimensions of forging and maintaining public reputations. This is revealed by some of the most captivating material in Disraeli’s archive: the large boxes of “fan letters” by ordinary members of the public, written in response to Disraeli’s novels Lothair (1870) and Endymion (1880), published in the wake of his first and second terms in office as prime minister.Footnote 2 The fact that one of the most eminent leaders of his day had returned to writing fiction, once his political career had come to an end, gave rise to a flurry of public attention that illuminates the complex interrelations of celebrity authorship, politics, market dynamics, and fan culture in a transnational context. Promising autobiographical revelation and privileged insight into the mind of an enigmatic public figure, the novels sparked intense curiosity and speculation; they also earned their author substantial advance payments, were reviewed in practically all major domestic and foreign newspapers and periodicals, and were translated into other European languages.Footnote 3
The carefully preserved letters by correspondents from all over Europe and the United States highlight the international reach of Disraeli’s reputation in the increasingly interconnected Victorian world, where new information technologies and communication networks ensured the large-scale mediatization, circulation, and commodification of an individual’s public image beyond national borders. They also allow for fascinating glimpses into the tactics of “imagined intimacy” between author and reader,Footnote 4 which became part and parcel of nineteenth-century literary celebrity culture to camouflage, or at least alleviate, the anonymizing impact of commercial publishing and the emergence of a mass readership.Footnote 5 Rooted in a desire to forge an affective bond with an individual who served both as an object of veneration and identification, these tactics are demonstrated by the varied personal responses to Disraeli’s literary work by ordinary letter-writers.
Some of these letters lend themselves to being read as (transnational) spaces in which specific identities were negotiated, claimed, and asserted. This particular function of epistolary correspondence comes to the fore prominently in the case of a remarkable, if short, sequence of six letters that forms part of the collection and was sent to Disraeli by a young woman from Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the writer, journalist, and translator Bettina Wirth (1849–1926).Footnote 6 Written in impeccable English and adorned by delicate drawings, the letters preceded and followed the publication of Disraeli’s last completed novel, Endymion, by Longmans in November 1880. Circumstantial evidence derived from the letters’ order and content suggests that the series was begun in September 1879 and dried up in February 1881,Footnote 7 a couple of months before Disraeli’s final illness and death. Wirth’s letters, as this article seeks to demonstrate, are fascinating documents that merit close scrutiny, as they are more than just a record of flamboyant expressions of ardent hero-worship and romantic projection, which testify to the transnational circulation, construction, and consumption of Disraeli’s fame. In addition, they offer revealing insights, not only into the gendered dynamics of fandom and cultural mediation, but also into the ambivalent position of the professional woman writer in nineteenth-century literary culture, oscillating between normative patterns of femininity and emancipatory self-assertion, decorous submission, and bold affirmation. What is more, Wirth’s letters—themselves mobile objects with a capacity to transcend national, social, cultural, and linguistic boundaries—give us a sense of how transnational practices could be strategically employed to forge a career during a period in which the sphere of cultural production enabled new degrees of female literary professionalism. As I will show in the following, multilingualism, epistolary network-building, translation, and cultural mediation conspicuously informed the construction and performance of Wirth’s authorial persona with a view to enhancing her prestige and cultural capital within the professional circles she desired to join. Her letters to Disraeli, I argue, must ultimately be regarded as a transnational space of self-invention and self-affirmation that allowed her to negotiate her authorial identity. She did so by creating what I refer to as an “autobiomyth”Footnote 8 —a mode of self-presentation that, in Wirth’s case, united writerly authority, agency, transcultural competence, and traditional middle-class femininity, and which was designed to boost as well as legitimize her career in such male-dominated professional domains as journalism and foreign correspondence. Drawing on transnational life-writing scholarship, I consider Wirth as a “transgressive subject” who strove to overcome sociocultural as well as spatial boundaries in her project of developing and expressing both personal and collective female identities.Footnote 9
Ultimately, Bettina Wirth’s letters must be valued for providing us with a glimpse of a remarkable life—albeit one that can only be pieced together from fragments, scattered across various archival holdings of those whose papers were deemed worth preserving. Despite the fact that Wirth could boast an impressive career as a writer, translator, journalist, and foreign correspondent, it is mostly through obscure review notes and snippets of information in historical newspapers and rudimentary entries in biographical dictionaries that we can get a sense of her achievements. In the process of tracing a life in bits and pieces, we must therefore be sensitive to, and then actively address, the gendered asymmetries of auto/biographical practice and archival preservation, which require us “as researchers [to] become both archivist and curator” in our task of studying, analyzing, and presenting these materials.Footnote 10 This article therefore moves beyond an analysis of Wirth’s letters to Disraeli to offer, for the first time, a more substantial biographical study of a woman writer whose transnational life and work deserve more rigorous scholarly exploration. Identifying the letters as a space for developing and honing a personal and professional set of skills, it ends with a brief overview of Wirth’s notable later career as an eminent journalist and foreign correspondent for the Daily News and other British and American papers. Though riddled with gaps, silences, and dead ends, Wirth’s cultural mediatorship between German- and English-speaking cultural contexts enriches our understanding of the shifts, manifestations, and complexities of professional female authorship in a transnationally connected literary marketplace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It points toward a new female writerly persona strategically built around cosmopolitan career trajectories and the (often flawed) forms of agency they entailed.
From an “obscure woman” to a “famous man”: Wirth’s Letters as a Transnational Space of Authorial Self-Invention
Bettina Wirth’s letters to Benjamin Disraeli map an inherently uneven and largely (though not entirely) nonreciprocal relationship—a fact of which Wirth was distinctly aware, writing, at one point: “I know that an obscure woman and a famous man are a very unfair exchange, but then there is the consideration that the woman loves you dearly in your beautiful works.”Footnote 11 Predominantly one-sided, the correspondence starkly illustrates how “structures of prominence are entwined with processes of marginalisation” and how these dynamics of fame and obscurity are inflected by, amongst other factors, gender-based inequalities.Footnote 12 At the same time, in a paradoxical twist, it is exactly this condition of lopsidedness that ensures the letters’ survival and to which we owe Wirth’s fleeting visibility in the archived records of eminent—usually male—public figures.Footnote 13 Her linguistic and cultural border-crossings, which laid the groundwork for her writing career and will be discussed in the following, distinctly complicate the process of piecing together Wirth’s life story. In fact, they pose additional challenges to researchers, such as the dearth or inaccessibility of life documents that often are lost in transit or dispersed across different archival institutions with their own distinct—and often still nationally oriented—collection practices. Any attempt to trace a migratory life like Wirth’s can only ever result in the kind of biographical patchwork that comes close to Pamela Scully’s concept of “heterography.” Acknowledging the fragmentary and the tentative, the speculative and the ambiguous that all lie at the heart of any biographical project, the “notion of heterography […] assumes the possibility of multiplicity of meaning”; it “involves giving up a search for the ‘whole subject’” as well as any illusory claims to capturing it in its entirety, and instead focuses on offering glimpses of multiple subjectivities.Footnote 14 In Wirth’s case, the absence of evidence of any systematic self-documentation (in the form of a diary or journal) or a traceable family archive compels us to pay attention to what Johanna Gehmacher calls “peripheral noises”:Footnote 15 nuggets of information, circumstances, or practices that appear only marginally relevant and yet add another facet to the fragmented life we encounter.
Asymmetries and Otherness: Biographical Preliminaries
By the time Wirth started writing to Disraeli in the late 1870s, “his fame had ceased to be insular,” as John Skelton noted in his obituary of the two-time Conservative prime minister, who had been made Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876: “Out of England he was the most famous of our statesmen; one of the two great figures of contemporary politics. In England we had Beaconsfield and Gladstone; in Europe they had Beaconsfield and Bismarck.”Footnote 16 Disraeli’s position as a towering figure in British and European politics must be situated within the larger context of nineteenth-century political celebrity culture, which emerged as a direct consequence of the gradual expansion of the electorate and the increased personalization and mediatization of the political sphere.Footnote 17 What clearly fueled his “celebrity capital,”Footnote 18 both at home and abroad, was what Leslie Stephen, in an 1874 review essay on the prime minister’s novelistic work, referred to as his “double consciousness”:Footnote 19 the mutually formative impact of his closely aligned literary and political personae. Recent scholarship on Disraeli has emphasized the ways in which both literature and politics served him as closely connected arenas of self-invention through which he fashioned his public and private identities at different stages of his life.Footnote 20 These striking interrelations certainly did not go unnoticed by Disraeli’s contemporaries. For the German-Austrian writer and critic Hugo Wittmann, for instance, reviewing Endymion for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, what set the novel’s author apart from other prominent figures of literary and political life was the fact that he “fused poetry [Poesie, in the German original] and politics so intimately that it is almost impossible to separate the two, and to tell at times which was the end and which only the means. His poetry is full of politics, his politics is full of poetry.”Footnote 21 Disraeli’s fluent migrations between these two fields clearly baffled contemporary commentators and defied common expectations of literary authorship, political office, and hierarchical conceptions of “higher” and “lesser” kinds of fame that the public associated with political leaders and writers.
Disraeli’s career was certainly an unusual one. If the gravitas of statesmanship and the fleeting celebrity of novel-writing already seemed like odd bedfellows, then the mercurial quality of Disraeli’s public image gained another lurid shade through the celebrity of his “otherness”: the exotic appeal of the transgressive, Jewish-born outsider who, against all odds, had succeeded in making it all the way to the “top of the greasy pole.”Footnote 22 Returning to such a vaguely frivolous activity as writing fiction somewhat disrupted this narrative of linear social advancement and was thus often dismissed by critics as a mercenary transaction, a money-making scheme that tied in neatly with anti-Semitic images of the Jewish peddler. Tropes of unorthodoxy and alienness featured prominently in the construction of Disraeli’s public image both within and beyond the British Isles, and would have been familiar to international audiences—including Bettina Wirth. It therefore seems legitimate to speculate whether an individual who had overcome prejudice and adversity to become the leader of an imperial nation held a special appeal to someone who had been facing her own obstacles to forging a successful career. Neither the novel-writing political upstart from a Jewish family nor the budding professional woman writer living in Vienna could lay claim to the socially leveling factors of family wealth or a university education (or indeed any formal schooling to speak of). Instead, both Wirth and Disraeli pursued similar strategies of authorial self-making and did so with dogged persistence, by establishing actual or symbolic bonds of identification with their literary heroes. Just as the young Disraeli styled himself as Byron’s disciple, to increase his celebrity capital through public visibility and social performance,Footnote 23 Wirth would engage in epistolary network-building to make influential connections and capitalize on her transnational experience to boost her career as a writer.
The sketchy biographical information about Wirth that can be gleaned from (mostly German-language) archival records, rudimentary lexicon entries, and other contemporary auto/biographical sources reveals a life lived in motion: a childhood, youth, and early adulthood spent in different countries and cultural settings due to family circumstances, political and economic vagaries, and marriage. Bettina Wirth was born Bettina Greiner in February 1849 to a lower-middle-class family in Munich, the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria; her mother was a trained milliner, and her father an engineer who had founded a company for the production of precision instruments, such as thermometers and other measuring equipment.Footnote 24 Following her father’s early death and her mother’s remarriage to the Italian business agent Candido del Negro in 1854, the family—which also included Wirth’s younger sister, Christine—moved to Venice, which was part of the Austrian Empire at the time. Del Negro’s anti-Habsburg political machinations, however, quickly led to him being exiled from the city and taking up work as a company representative for Venetian glass pearl manufacturers in Leipzig and London, where the family settled in the mid-1850s.Footnote 25 In 1864, three years after the Kingdom of Italy had been established, they moved back to the Continent and took up residence in Turin, the new Italian state’s first capital, where del Negro eventually managed to secure a position as high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. When Turin was replaced by Florence as the new Italian capital in 1865, the del Negros set up their home in the Tuscan city for the next six years and quickly became part of a lively social circle of cosmopolitan artists, intellectuals, and politicians.Footnote 26 The memoir published in old age by Wirth’s sister, Christine Thaler (1852–1936), suggests that the sisters’ education was patchy and erratic, and included only brief spells of formal schooling, such as a two-year stint at a “young ladies school” in London.Footnote 27 Largely self-taught and well read, they acquired near-native proficiency in Italian, English, and French—a skill they would subsequently, and with remarkable resourcefulness, turn into their primary asset.
Thaler’s memoir is an invaluable source that sheds light on the sisters’ early transnational movements and addresses both the perks and drawbacks of living mobile lives, as well as the strains and hardships faced by women who opted to pursue a writing career, whether out of vocation or necessity. Though formative and enriching, the family’s frequent relocations also brought in their wake instability, uprootedness, domestic upheaval, and financial difficulties, which, as Thaler implies, stemmed from her stepfather’s luckless business ventures, political scheming, and tendency of getting himself into scrapes with his superiors.Footnote 28 This ambivalent experience of migration and transnational settings points toward the “paradoxical nature of cosmopolitanism” that Stefano Evangelista has identified; “simultaneously a position of strength and vulnerability,” it could entail privilege, prestige, and elitism as much as involuntary exile, insecurity, and nonbelonging.Footnote 29 As Bettina and her sister were encouraged, early on, to make potentially advantageous connections and acquaintances with a clear view to climbing the social ladder, they learned that their transnational upbringing and multilingualism—resulting from decisions made by the male head of the family rather than their own choices—could be mobilized as a strategic asset. It could open doors and secure privileged access to information, but, as Thaler’s account suggests, this access often depended on the goodwill and mentorship of influential men.
According to Thaler, it was Bettina Wirth’s future husband, the German economist and journalist Max Wirth (1822–1900), whom she had met in Florence in 1869, who encouraged her first forays into the writing profession by suggesting that she should become a correspondent for a series of Swiss and German newspapers: “Indeed, nothing would be easier for us [sisters] than to write political reports: all we had to do was write down the conversations our friends engaged in every evening and the article was ready to go.”Footnote 30 Thaler’s portrayal of their work as unoriginal reportage could be read as ironic comment on the downplaying of women’s professional achievements, but it does highlight the importance of high-powered (familial) connections to help them launch a career. In fact, Bettina’s collaborative relationship with Max Wirth soon led to their marriage, in July 1870, and her move to Berne, where her husband was the director of the Swiss Bureau of Statistics and she published her first novella. Künstler und Fürstenkind [Artist and Princely Child] was first serialized in 1873 under the pseudonym of “August Lienhardt” in Die Gartenlaube, one of the most widely read German illustrated magazines of its day. In 1874, following a brief stint in Wirth’s native city, Breslau (today Wrocław in Poland), the couple eventually settled in Vienna, after Max received an offer to work for the Neue Freie Presse—the leading liberal-bourgeois Austrian newspaper of its day—as the paper’s economics and finance editor.Footnote 31 This position came with a host of valuable contacts that could serve as a springboard for an aspiring young writer. In the years that followed the Wirths’ move to Vienna, Bettina appears to have doubled her efforts to pursue a literary career: her debut novella, which was republished as a book under her own name in 1876 and apparently also came out in English and Italian translations, was followed by the novels Die Stiefgeschwister [The Stepsiblings, 1877] and Hohe Loose [Lofty Lots, 1883] as well as a handful of short fiction, written for a number of German and Austrian periodicals. From the early 1880s, she also cultivated her professional identity as a journalist and foreign correspondent for the London Daily News and other English-language papers,Footnote 32 which will be discussed in more detail in the last section of this article.
It is worth retracing Bettina Wirth’s transnational biography and the ways it intersected with her literary career in some detail, as it makes her readable as a “transboundary” subject, whose (self-fashioned) identity is built around the notion of physical and metaphorical transgression: multiform ways of transcending territorial and linguistic boundaries as well as pushing against sociocultural norms.Footnote 33 Indeed, spatial movement and the engagement with shifting cultural contexts and systems of social convention can thus open up a liberating “in-between space that allows for reinvention, creative experiment, emancipation, and intellectual and personal freedoms.”Footnote 34 The full range of these possibilities may have been more difficult to attain for Wirth as a middle-class wife and mother with domestic responsibilities; nonetheless, as her letters to Disraeli demonstrate, her transnational life constituted a fundamental component of the authorial persona she attempted to create, which, in itself, could be read as a carefully framed act of transgression.
Transgressive Acts? Claiming Authorial Agency through “Fan Letters”
As border-crossing objects that connect people and places as well as public and private spheres, letters were an apt medium for Bettina Wirth’s project of fashioning her authorial persona. They served both as a means of building networks for the sake of professional advancement and a framework in which alternative versions of female selfhood could be negotiated. As with many middle-class women writers, this persona united the identities of educated, worldly, and artistically gifted craftswoman and devoted mother and wife.Footnote 35 The feat of launching a professional writing career within the bounds of traditional middle-class femininity was certainly aided, in Wirth’s case, by her cosmopolitan outlook and transcultural competence. Foregrounding her language skills, stressing her eligibility as a translator, and subtly pointing toward her transnational network might have been part of a complex set of tactics to justify what could otherwise easily have been construed as inappropriate self-advertisement. Such instances of bold authorial self-assertion were framed by postures of submissive reverence and self-deprecation, as Wirth unmistakably drew on the established model of the “female helpmeet,” who was to enable and facilitate the expression of “male genius.” We can only speculate about Wirth’s motivations for striking up a correspondence with Disraeli, and what she hoped to gain from it, but it becomes clear that she knew how to exploit the dynamics of closeness and distance that characterize the epistolary genre.Footnote 36
In her first letter, from September 15, 1879, Wirth presents herself as a perceptive and admiring reader, keen to establish an intellectual and emotional connection between herself and the famous author-politician:
The wish to adress [sic] you by letter my Lord, has been alive with me a long time, but I should never have dared so much, had not your own words, “The praise of a fool is incense to the wisest of us,” encouraged me to do so. It is to tell you that your novels—I have only read “Lothair,” “Vivian Grey” and “Henrietta Temple”—have made me very happy while perusing them, that I admire them above all things, and that I thank you for having written them. England may have gained a great deal by your saying “vale” to romance, but the world’s literature has lost quite as much. I shall ever be one of your sincerest admirers, and should consider making friends with you, as almost the highest advantage life could grant.Footnote 37
Casting herself as the deferential party in an inherently unequal power relationship, Wirth employed a strategy that has been identified by Sharon Marcus as a common feature of fan-celebrity relations. Like most individuals who initiate contact with famous public figures, her aim was not to “overturn established hierarchies” but to acquire “a share of the celebrity’s wealth and status” by entering a mode of communication that, at least potentially, “foster[ed] proximity, familiarity, and interdependence.”Footnote 38 Fandom, the way Wirth performed it in her letters to Disraeli, must therefore be understood as an “active and participatory process” through which the fan invests the object of identification with a set of meanings and values and, at the same time, is empowered to “experiment with other identities and more creative ways of being.”Footnote 39 Wirth’s letters, thus, in many ways became a vessel for negotiating, projecting, and manifesting her desires and ambitions, aided by the affordances of a mercurial genre that promised authenticity and material presence, while being subject to premeditation, artifice, and socioculturally contingent writing conventions. Moreover, as Liz Stanley has argued, the creation of “a particular representational epistolary guise” is always—even if the correspondence is lopsided—informed by the intrinsically dialogic quality of letter-writing, which anticipates the intended recipient’s response or even imagines the reactions of other readers.Footnote 40 Whether Wirth was expecting an actual reply from Disraeli or not, she would almost certainly have proceeded on the assumption that the correspondence of an eminent public figure would not only be seen by other members of his household but kept and potentially even prepared for posthumous publication. This awareness of the letter as a medium capable of traversing public and private spheres fluently—a form and genre made for expressing private subjectivities while being shared and circulated within the public realm—shines through the way in which she designed her letters as stylized artworks, a remarkable feature to which I will return in the discussion that follows.
From internal evidence in Wirth’s letters, it can be inferred that Disraeli must have sent at least three replies, one of which can be located in the Austrian National Library among the papers of the Austrian entrepreneur and arts patron August von Miller zu Aichholz, who seems to have acquired this and other items in Wirth’s possession during her lifetime. Simply signed “Beaconsfield,” this handwritten letter, dated September 23, 1879, was a direct response to Wirth’s initial communication, composed roughly one week earlier, and picked up her turn of phrase by stating: “You have ‘made friends with me’; by your simple and graceful note. And I appreciate the sympathy of a mind, which, I am sure, is intelligent and refined.” While insisting that he was unable to enter into a correspondence with her (“for I have no time even for the duties of life”), Disraeli ended his letter with what must have been taken as a gesture of encouragement: “if you will sometimes convey to me your literary tastes and impressions, I am sure they will refresh me in the torment of existence.”Footnote 41 As it turned out, Wirth was not shy to follow up on what she evidently chose to interpret as an invitation on Disraeli’s part to stay in touch. What is more, in her subsequent letter of October 4, 1879, she started asserting—shrewdly and strategically—her professional identity as a fellow artist and published author, while emphasizing her role as a homemaker and assuming a posture of humble subservience:
I know full well that I have no right to be troubling Your Lordship again so soon, but how can I help it, when by sending me so kind and delightful a letter, you have laid a debt of gratitude upon me, which makes me unfit for family duties, unless I be allowed to discharge it to you, and to tell you that the masterstroke of your pen has never given such intense pleasure. […] I have read a great deal, and written a little, and when some fine book had exalted me to a higher aim, I had always said to myself: Some day with the help of a brave heart we will rise as high. All that, pleasant as it was, is over, since I have read your works. There is no longer the slightest hope of getting beyond mediocrity, and not the slightest ambition to come to that, when the mind has once found out what perfection is.Footnote 42
Situating herself within dominant discourses around creative production that revolved around images of “male genius” versus “female dilettantism” could be regarded as a calculated move to temper the emancipatory potential associated with a middle-class woman’s aspirations to pursue a literary career. The transgressive possibilities of writing as a mode of self-affirmation, intellectual challenge, and validation apparently warranted what reads like an apologetic disclaimer on Wirth’s part; an assurance that she was not a radical “bluestocking” who had sacrificed her “true” calling on the altar of literary ambition: “Do not you however pity me for a blighted damsel, for I am married to a very good and clever man—Max Wirth, the economist—and I have the finest little boy for my own, to console me for any literary disappointments, especially when, as is the case at present, I have a novel in my hand, by one whom I am happy beyond all saying to call my friend.”Footnote 43 The ambivalence of Wirth’s letters can be read as symptomatic of the “double-voicedness” characterizing the work of many late nineteenth-century women writers, who “aspire to the ideal of the ‘new woman,’ yet still remain caught in the web of traditional discourses.”Footnote 44 Foundational scholarship on the “New Woman” phenomenon has put emphasis on the wide array of ambivalent and often contradictory models of female selfhood subsumed under the term.Footnote 45 Emerging at a time when Wirth was advancing her career as a writer, it came to encompass a heterogenous group of (middle-class) women—married or unmarried—who sought access to paid employment and higher education, navigated and pushed the constraints of legal and social inequalities, campaigned for political representation, or pursued their vocational aspirations. As Ann Heilmann has shown, the “semantic instability of the term ‘New Woman’ derives in part from the multiplicity of agents who had an ideological stake in constructing her,”Footnote 46 and which included prominent feminist writer-activists like Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand as well as determined antisuffrage campaigners such as Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphry Ward)—all of whom were Wirth’s contemporaries. In her discussion of Ward—best-selling writer, family breadwinner, and eminent educational reformer—and other traditionalist women writers, Heilmann draws attention to the “blatant inconsistencies between the writers’ independent, professional lives and their ultra-conservative message,”Footnote 47 which was frequently structured around a heightened emphasis of femininity. The latter is a salient characteristic of Wirth’s letters and in line with her performative act of downplaying her efforts of launching a writing career as amateurish dabbling in literature, which must be set against the background of systemic structures that impeded the visibility of female creative labor.
As noted earlier, by the time she embarked on her correspondence with Disraeli, Wirth was far from being a novice in the world of professional writing. Considering that, aged thirty, she could boast impressive credentials as a published author of short and long fiction, we might speculate whether Wirth’s modesty about her own literary achievements served, in fact, a more calculated purpose, in line with the autobiomythographical project she pursued in her letters to Disraeli. I develop the concept of the “autobiomyth” in analogy to Michael Benton’s idea of “biomythography” to account for the strategic forms and methods of autobiographical expression that help build, shape, and sustain a distinct persona.Footnote 48 Broadly understood as a way of “‘doing’ identity […] as a relational […] and as a social process,”Footnote 49 persona emerges from a performance of selfhood that is addressed to different audiences and often aids the fulfillment of specific objectives. In the process of persona-creation, individuals draw on available models of identity and an existing cultural repertoire of postures, which, in Wirth’s case, comprised the romantically attached, enthusiastic reader and the dutiful mother and wife as well as the learned writing woman. In the context of nineteenth-century gender identities, the latter version of female selfhood tended to overlap with that of the “educated supporter of a brilliant man,” which included the (often combined) roles of secretary, researcher, or housekeeper.Footnote 50 This was a socially accepted script that intellectual women like Wirth, as the wife of a well-known scholar and journalist, would have been familiar with; it was also one that supported the development of a female scholarly persona—certainly in Austria and Germany, where there were limited chances at the time for women to obtain formal higher education. While the first women’s colleges in Britain were founded in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and the University of London, in 1878, became the first British university to award degrees to women, it was not until 1897 that women were formally admitted as regular students at the University of Vienna’s humanities faculty.Footnote 51
Ultimately, the autobiomyths we encounter in Wirth’s letters create a palpable tension between conservatism and empowerment. As Ann Heilmann and Valerie Sanders note in their study of feminist and antifeminist positions in Victorian women’s writing, such textual slippage might be attributed to “unresolved anxieties […], prompted by the friction between personal and political identities, or to a deliberate strategy of dissimulation with the aim of reader seduction.”Footnote 52 Created for the sake of meeting specific purposes, Wirth’s autobiomyths contributed to the formation of a persona riddled with ambiguity and contradictions, which is inevitable if we subscribe to Johanna Gehmacher’s useful conception of persona as a “bricolage constructed in response to various obstacles, exclusions, limitations, and also opportunities.”Footnote 53 The task of engineering an authorial persona that would enhance Wirth’s standing in a male-dominated line of profession required both pragmatic concessions and bold pronouncements through modes of self-presentation that, to a considerable extent, revolved around the transgressive potential of transnational practices.
“Like a bridge across the great distance that separates England and Austria”: Shaping a Transnational Authorial Persona
On a merely practical level, Bettina Wirth’s letters to Disraeli opened up a transnational space of communication and connection at a time when her previously nomadic lifestyle had been replaced by more settled circumstances and when professional and familial obligations presumably rendered extended travel more difficult. In fact, they compellingly illustrate how it was possible, for the letter-writer, to “inhabit a cosmopolitan universe without even leaving home” and, in turn, to capitalize on the kudos derived from transnational network-building and the ostentatious displays of transcultural competence.Footnote 54 In this regard, Wirth’s letter from November 20, 1880, which must be read in the context of the imminent publication of Disraeli’s novel Endymion, is particularly noteworthy, as it contained an extraordinary proposal:
I have a great favour to ask of Your Lordship. There cannot be anyone in the world who admires your writings as I do—am I then not the fit person to translate your work into German? My veneration for your genius is not my only qualification for the task—you will see that, and others will tell you. I have been trying to picture to myself what “Endymion” would be like, ever since the name was made known to me, and am now as eager to read it, as I am to see your face for once in my life. Please, remember, no one will translate your every word more carefully, more lovingly than I should, and do not refuse my request if you can help it.Footnote 55
Abandoning her previous reticence, Wirth forcefully advertised the credentials that ostensibly rendered her the ideal person to translate Disraeli’s new novel into German. What was artfully framed as a deferential appeal to the special emotional and intellectual bond imagined to exist between reader and writer constituted an attempt to boost her professional reputation by becoming known as the authorized German translator of an international literary sensation. Lothair, Disraeli’s first postpremiership novel, when it was published in 1870, was immediately distributed on the continent by Tauchnitz as part of its English-language “Collection of British and American Authors” series and subsequently came out in 1874 with the Leipzig-based publishing house Günther in a German translation by Anna Wünn.Footnote 56 The novel’s enormous success eventually led to Thomas Longman’s offer of £10,000 for the copyright of “‘Lothair’s Brother,’” Endymion, on which Disraeli had been working throughout his second term in office as prime minister. The proposed figure was what Longman “believe[d] to be the largest sum ever paid for a work of fiction,” as he stated in a letter to Disraeli’s private secretary, Lord Rowton, in August 1880, shortly before the novel’s publication.Footnote 57
Given the considerable amount of publicity generated by Disraeli’s new novel within the British Isles and beyond, it is easy to see how Wirth might have benefited from being connected with what was, undeniably, the literary work of the hour. As a translator, she would have been in an important gatekeeping position, enabling access to a newly published work by one of the most influential public figures of the day and thus facilitating its international reception. On the whole, it seems crucial to note that transnational practices, such as translation, literary network-building, and cultural mediation, played an important role in the development of a new female persona—the scholarly woman writer, skilled, educated, economically independent, and yet often rendered invisible by the “gendered concepts of male knowledge production and female reproduction.”Footnote 58 Indeed, a closer examination of the biographies of late nineteenth-century professional women writers reveals transnational experience and expertise as prominent threads running through their lives and careers. Many of them, such as the most famous exponents of New Womanhood, Olive Schreiner and George Egerton, shared migratory and cosmopolitan life trajectories;Footnote 59 others, like Mathilde Blind and Eleanor Marx, had exilic, multilingual family backgrounds—prerequisites that rendered them particularly well suited for “carrying visions and ideas across linguistic, cultural and even historical boundaries” in the form of reviewing and translation work.Footnote 60 The agency gained via the mastery and display of such a specialized skill set was, however, often double-edged: reliant on male networks, sustained through fame by association, and feeding off an apotheosis of male “genius” and “greatness.”Footnote 61
In the end, Disraeli declined Wirth’s request, as indicated by her letter from December 23, 1880, in which she thanked “Your Lordship for the kind answer to my letter, which made the disappointment of not being able to translate ‘Endymion’ less bitter.”Footnote 62 Two days earlier, the Wirths had apparently managed to get hold of the novel, which had been published in Britain on November 24 and was—like Lothair—distributed by Tauchnitz for a European readership. Complimenting Disraeli on his latest literary success, Wirth was quick to seize the opportunity to commemorate his birthday—not, however, without subtly weaving in a strategically placed reference to her childhood and youth spent in England and the education she received there: “Christmastime reminds me of you, if reminding were indeed needed. ‘Many happy returns of the day’ were the first English words they taught the little German girl twenty-five years ago. I have never repeated them with as much fervour or with sincerer wishes than I do now to you.”Footnote 63 Wirth, not to be deterred, appears to have been sounding out alternative ways of keeping up, and strengthening, her newly formed, prominent ties.
In this context, it is worth noting that Wirth was not the only one who approached Disraeli with a translation request. The prestige that could be accumulated through such a project also attracted other aspirants who would try their luck, hoping to convert the cultural capital thus gained into more tangible forms of economic profit. The box of correspondence that holds the Wirth letters also contains a letter by one Lydia Wagner-Heim, who appealed to Disraeli to grant her the German translation rights for Endymion in order to ease the financial hardship experienced by her and her husband. A note scribbled on the back of the letter gives us a hint as to the kind of reply elicited by this and similar proposals: “Answer? Publishers have already made necessary arrangements.”Footnote 64 Indeed, the German translation of Endymion, produced by Carl Böttger, must already have been in preparation at this point, for it came out in 1881 with Brockhaus in Leipzig.
Trying to cajole Disraeli into authorizing her to become the German translator of his latest literary success might have been a long shot,Footnote 65 but Wirth also used her communications to initiate smaller-scale but nonetheless symbolic (and potentially profitable) transactions. The same letter that contained her offer to translate Endymion also included her photograph, which she enclosed as a physical token of remembrance, urging Disraeli to return the favor. Wirth’s portrait, in fact, draws our attention to one of the most salient features of her letters: the carefully crafted, decorative pieces of artwork that adorn the upper-left-hand corner of the first page in the style of a pictorial letterhead. According to her sister, Wirth was a gifted graphic artist who, when the family was living in Florence, had been given drawing lessons by the German painter Franz von Lenbach.Footnote 66 Moreover, other letters by Wirth from around the same period, housed by the Manuscript Department of the Vienna City Library, reveal similar design and composition patterns,Footnote 67 which makes it seem unlikely that anyone other than Wirth could have been the creator of these ink drawings. Ultimately, however, the question of authorship is secondary when considering the readerly expectations raised by the genre; since the sketches form part of an ego-document, we are inclined to read them not merely as random embellishments but as autobiographically inflected illustrations that—at least potentially—enrich, and interact closely with, the text. Ranging from stock depictions of bucolic idyls and rustic lovers’ trysts to portraits of pining romantic heroines in unspecified historical settings, some images strongly evoke the idea of a self-portrait, or at least a visual performance of the self, that fed into, and augmented, Wirth’s project of epistolary persona-formation. For instance, the image of the pensive young woman, seated at her desk, quill in hand, a sheet of writing paper in front of her (fig. 1), captures and underscores the theme of Wirth’s letter from November 20, 1880, in which she boldly claimed and asserted her authorial identity as an accomplished writer and potential translator. While adding a layer of meaning to the text, the drawings themselves stand out as powerful expressions and signals of the letter-writer’s creative potential, offering material evidence of her many artistic talents and craftsmanship. Wirth’s authorial persona thus emerges through a complex interaction of text and image, in which the illustrations function as creative appropriations and projections of Wirth’s multiple agendas, desires, and emotional states, rather than straightforward mirror portraits.
Detail from Wirth’s letter to Disraeli, November 20, 1880, Papers of Benjamin Disraeli, Bodleian Library.
The kissing couple in traditional Austrian costume (fig. 2), we may assume, is a carefully chosen motif that reflects and accentuates the intimate emotional bond that Wirth sought to establish in what appears to be her last letter to Disraeli from February 15, 1881. Simply signed “Bettina,” this was a lengthy and enthusiastic note in response to a communication by Disraeli, which apparently contained the much-coveted boon of mutual recognition she had requested—his photograph, which has also been preserved in the Miller-Aichholz collection of the Austrian National Library. Excitedly, Wirth wrote:
I wonder if you are aware my Lord that I received your letter with its precious contents on St. Valentine’s day? You cannot change that fact, and you must be my Valentine, whether you will or no. What rare fun! I wish I could kiss your hands for having sent me that picture—it is like a bridge across the great distance that separates England and Austria. Now that I have read all your books—some of them more than once—, and that your picture stands on my writing table, I am making myself believe that I know you well, that you are indeed my friend, a much more intimate friend than many with whom I exchange vows of friendship from time to time.Footnote 68
Detail from Wirth’s letter to Disraeli, February 15, 1881, Papers of Benjamin Disraeli, Bodleian Library.
Wirth’s lines are striking in their emotional intensity and forceful projection of intimacy, fueled by the arrival of an object that clearly answered her need to place a somewhat loose and abstract relationship onto a more solid footing. As a material, collectible, and displayable token of affinity, Disraeli’s signed photograph could be treated as a stand-in for the man’s physical presence, with a capacity to affirm, as well as strengthen, a bond of closeness between the correspondents. Proudly displayed on one’s writing table, it acted as a trophy, a “contemporary form of holy relic,”Footnote 69 that signaled reciprocity and interaction and implied a transfer of prestige that could be translated into material reward or professional benefit.Footnote 70
Just like Wirth’s previous letters to Disraeli, this one consisted of a curious mix of literary fandom, exuberant displays of romantic identification, and more or less forceful efforts at self-promotion. “I wish no one but myself had read ‘Endymion,’” she mused. “[I]t seems to me as though you had confessed the inmost thoughts of your soul, […] and I am sorry all the world should know it. When I had read ‘Endymion’ I felt as if you had told it to me, and when I remembered how many thousands had read the book besides myself—I felt a pang of grief.”Footnote 71 After invoking the intimate connection between author and reader through his work, Wirth could not help closing her letter with what was, essentially, a sly plug designed to flag her illustrious personal and professional contacts in Vienna and further afield: “You will forgive the length of my letter […], and remember that there is a grateful woman who deeply feels the kindness you have shown her. I hope your Lordship will not laugh at me and call me ‘gushingly eloquent’ as did the editor of the ‘Art Journal’ for whom I am describing our great painter Hans Makart’s studio.”Footnote 72 The piece to which Wirth was referring, entitled “Hans Makart and His Studio,” eventually appeared in the 1881 volume of the Art Journal,Footnote 73 one of the most influential nineteenth-century British art magazines. Signed “B. Worth,” in what might have been a deliberate obscuring of (female) authorship rather than a misspelling, Bettina Wirth’s insider report from the creative sanctum of the Austrian history painter most probably owed its existence to her sister, Christine, who had been painted by Makart in 1875.Footnote 74
Such references to Wirth’s professional activities and high-profile connections played up her repute as a writer, ostensibly in an effort to impress her influential correspondent, who, in turn, might have been able to secure similarly prestigious commissions for her.Footnote 75 Any such hopes Wirth might have placed in her “friendship” with Disraeli were radically cut short when he fell ill in the spring of 1881 and died on April 19. The eminent statesman and novelist may no longer have been available as a potential patron and mentor, but Wirth’s letters to him can be regarded as a blueprint through which she developed, practiced, and perfected the autobiomythographical tactics of authorial self-assertion that would prove essential for the type of professional identity she was in the process of cultivating at the time. Transnational network-building, cultural mediation, and the tenacious trading of symbolic goods, such as information, expertise, and authority, were indeed the bread and butter of what was to become, according to Sophie Pataky, Bettina Wirth’s “real vocation”: journalism.Footnote 76
Epilogue: Wirth as a Journalist and Foreign Correspondent
Wirth’s letters to Disraeli and the authorial autobiomyths they contain must indeed be read in the context of Wirth’s endeavors of reviving and advancing a particular strand of her writing career in which, over the years, she would attain considerable standing. From the early 1880s onward, she seems to have dedicated herself more or less exclusively to journalism—a profession in which, as Pataky notes, “she gained a position that enabled her to be ranked equal with the men in the same field.”Footnote 77 Her obituary in Neues Wiener Journal even describes her as “the first woman journalist in Germany and Austria,” whose funeral was attended by the leading figures of Austrian journalism as well as representatives of the foreign press and international news agencies.Footnote 78 Wirth’s foreign-language skills, resourceful (transnational) networking, and self-confident maneuvering in different contexts were certainly important prerequisites for a successful career in journalism, which—as a relatively open field of occupation with no formal training requirements—in the course of the nineteenth century was becoming an increasingly attractive profession for women.Footnote 79 As F. Elizabeth Gray has noted, it made available “new sources of recognition and new forms of identity,” especially to educated middle-class women like Wirth, whose journalistic work not only held the key to social and political circles otherwise not easily accessible but enabled a new self-understanding as a professional author. At the same time, women seized the opportunities offered by expanding literary marketplaces and growing readerships, frequently turning to journalism as a means of securing an income, either to support themselves or to contribute to family finances.Footnote 80
Wirth’s sister, Christine Thaler, recalled that their early forays into journalism were partly driven by existential pressures to bolster the strained household budget.Footnote 81 Double-voiced, just like Wirth’s letters, Thaler’s autobiographical account presents journalistic writing as a route for women to achieve economic independence while highlighting their reliance on male patronage, which, in turn, required the strategic performance of disavowing any motive liable to be construed as presumptuous or overly ambitious. Reflecting on—and justifying—her decision to pursue a career in journalism, Thaler fashioned an ironically tinged autobiomyth that revolved around hardship and idealistic commitment as the only “acceptable” factors determining female career choices: “The fact is that the eminent personages—all of them old or elderly gentlemen, by the way—enjoyed promoting the young woman who wanted to become a journalist. All the more so as they knew that I had not taken up the pen out of a feeling of megalomania, but out of an inner urge and to earn a living.”Footnote 82 For Thaler, as an unmarried woman, journalism was indeed a way to ensure her upkeep, especially after her stepfather had abandoned the family in the mid-1870s and she and her mother had moved to Vienna, where she could hope for familial support and her brother-in-law’s connections to help her gain a foothold in the local journalistic scene.Footnote 83 It was also, however, an occupation through which she could build and assert her authorial identity, as indicated by her memoir’s subtitle, The Autobiography of the First Female German Journalist—a title apparently claimed by, and/or attributed to, both Bettina and Christine.
We do not know whether Wirth’s renewed efforts to launch a journalistic career were determined by a need to contribute to the family income, but it seems that moving in a journalistic milieu as the wife of a prominent journalist would have provided her with a set of valuable contacts that could be useful, for instance, when it came to placing her literary work. It is tempting to speculate, therefore, whether the title page of the Viennese Neue Illustrirte Zeitung of May 1, 1881, and its layout, were merely coincidental or, in fact, contained a carefully engineered visual tribute to Wirth’s short-lived connection with Disraeli (fig. 3). The front page featured an engraved portrait of the recently deceased “Lord Beaconsfield”—framed by an installment of Wirth’s serialized novel Hohe Loose, and thus representing a publicly visible symbolic union of the “famous man” and the (no longer) “obscure woman.”
Neue Illustrirte Zeitung, May 1, 1881.
The transnational strategies and skills Wirth had practiced in her letters to Disraeli formed the cornerstone of the distinctive direction her journalistic career would eventually take. Wirth’s multilingualism and cosmopolitan outlook were not only an asset for local, Vienna-based papers but made her an ideal foreign correspondent who would regularly report from Vienna for the London Daily News, The Economist, the New York World, as well as a number of German papers.Footnote 84 By the late 1880s, Wirth had attained a prominent position in the field, which included other notable female trailblazers, such as Emily Crawford (Daily News Paris correspondent), Flora Shaw (colonial editor for The Times), and, famously, the world-traveling investigative reporter Nellie Bly.Footnote 85 Despite the considerable inroads made by women into the world of journalism in the course of the nineteenth century, foreign correspondence was still a “resoundingly ‘masculine’” preserve,Footnote 86 which is attested to by a remarkable feature on the representatives of the foreign press in Vienna that appeared in Die Illustration in September 1890. Introducing, and including the portraits of, fourteen foreign correspondents for The Times, Le Figaro, the New York Herald, and others, it spotlighted Bettina Wirth—representing the Daily News—as the only woman in their ranks (fig. 4). The report itself is remarkable, because it emphasized the crucial role of foreign correspondents in shaping Vienna’s international reputation: “It is they who, as eye and ear witnesses, write and telegraph about everything that is likely to make Vienna interesting ‘out there’ and encourage travellers to get personally acquainted with the city they have read about with great delight.”Footnote 87 The three-page article is symptomatic of a distinct esprit de corps that foreign correspondents were beginning to develop in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As potential gatekeepers, political agents, and cross-cultural mediators, they understood themselves as a journalistic elite, whose work had a concrete impact on public opinion and could therefore even affect international diplomacy.Footnote 88 Through international associations and networks, they aimed to heighten the profession’s public visibility and prestige and to help their members obtain privileged access to influential public figures, events, or sources of information.Footnote 89
Die Illustration, September 16, 1890, Vienna City Library F-38296/1889, 1890.
For Wirth, being part of such an illustrious professional in-group became integral to her public self-presentations and, thus, her authorial persona. This finds expression in the various letterheads she used from the mid-1880s onward, which identified her as a correspondent for an impressive range of international newspapers, or her entry in Lehmann’s Vienna address directory, in which, from 1888, she was listed separately from her husband as “representative of the London Daily News.” In addition, Wirth was a member and served on the boards of several professional networks and societies. In 1887, for instance, she became the first female journalist to be admitted to the Vienna Foreign Press Association (Verband der auswärtigen Presse), which had been founded in 1883.Footnote 90 Even more remarkably, she was a founding member of the Society of Women Journalists (the predecessor of today’s Society of Women Writers and Journalists), which was established in London in 1894 as a “trade union” lobbying for the professional representation and economic security of women artists, writers, and journalists. As the Neue Freie Presse approvingly noted at the time, Wirth was among the society’s ten elected vice presidents, only two of whom were non-British nationals.Footnote 91 As Johanna Gehmacher has shown, there was often a direct link between journalism and transnational activist movements.Footnote 92 While to date no evidence has come to light that suggests that Wirth positioned herself at the forefront of contemporary political debates, her support of, and active involvement in, professional women’s associations clearly had an activist dimension. In Vienna, she was—up until 1920—a board member of the Union of Women Writers and Artists (Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen Wien), which had been founded in 1885 as a women’s network and self-help organization aimed at setting up a pension fund to support its members in cases of illness, destitution, and old age.Footnote 93 Even though the union distanced itself from the activities of the more overtly political Austrian women’s movement, it served as a “counterpublic” where women from different social backgrounds could engage in literary-artistic exchange and network-building.Footnote 94 The transnational quality of the latter activity is evidenced by the union’s decision, from around 1900, to admit foreign honorary members, which, according to the annual report for 1910/11, included George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mrs. Humphry Ward.Footnote 95
The roles and positions Wirth occupied in these professional organizations allowed her to engage in moderate forms of activism without risking a reputation of militancy, which was a major concern to traditionalist (and openly antisuffrage) women writers like Ward.Footnote 96 Primarily, however, they enabled her to extend her transnational circle of contacts. Letters by Wirth preserved in the Austrian National Library and the Vienna City Library offer glimpses of a shrewd and enterprising operator, who pursued her agendas with a mix of hard-nosed persistence, compelling persuasiveness, and coquettish cajolery. These letters and other contemporary sources reveal that Disraeli was not the only famous individual whom Wirth approached in search of a gateway to professional success and recognition, capitalizing on her transnational experience and skills as a cultural mediator along the way. A newspaper report from late November 1897 on a particularly stormy session of the House of Representatives in the Austrian Imperial Assembly not only highlights Wirth’s tenacity and strong professional ethos but points toward another intriguing connection: “The journalists’ box in the second gallery, in which the representatives of the foreign papers have their seats, is also vacated. Mark Twain, who is in this box, must also leave. Mrs. Bettina Wirth, correspondent of the ‘Daily News,’ refuses to leave her seat for a very long time, but finally she, too, has to comply with the servants’ request.”Footnote 97 Indeed, Wirth and Twain appear to have been in close contact during the latter’s extended stay in Austria between 1897 and 1899. It is easy to see why Wirth, by then a well-established and respected journalist, would have been eager to claim her own share in the public excitement surrounding the presence of an international literary celebrity and benefit from her close association with him. Apparently, it was Wirth who helped Twain draft a speech in German, which he delivered at the Concordia Press Club on October 31, 1897, with local dignitaries such as Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, and Wirth herself in attendance.Footnote 98
Retracing some of the peaks of Wirth’s remarkable career in journalism, one might safely claim that in the decade that followed her correspondence with Disraeli, she “made it” in a field where visibly successful women were still somewhat rare. In lieu of other sources of influence and status, Wirth drew her cultural capital almost exclusively from her multilingualism, transcultural competence, and transnational connections, which she exploited with ingenuity and determination. However, the agency thus obtained came with a treacherous double bind, because it largely confined her to the roles of helpmeet and amanuensis and fed off the leverage accrued through her proximity to male power and fame. “Making it” in a male-dominated professional domain like journalism also meant shouldering its considerable pressures, the heavy workload and tight schedules, which took their toll, as Wirth confessed in an undated letter to her friend Julie Wertheimer: “Always writing telegrams and notes, ‘Letters from Vienna,’ and stock exchange correspondence is discipline but not an unalloyed pleasure.”Footnote 99 Magnified by the need to secure the family’s income through full-time journalism after Max Wirth’s death in 1900, these responsibilities eventually came at the cost of giving up her own literary ambitions. This is suggested by Wirth’s handwritten response to a questionnaire, issued and sent to its contributors (most likely in the late 1890s or early 1900s) by the Viennese daily newspaper Deutsche Zeitung (1871–1907). Asked to provide information on her current literary projects (“When do you intend to complete and publish this work?”), she wrote: “Frankly, since I’ve been completely absorbed by my journalistic work, I cannot even remember when I did anything else and what it was.”Footnote 100 Her answer is a telling reminder of the burdens entailed by such a career, forged through a mix of choice, circumstance, and necessity.
If the day-to-day business of journalism left no room for literary work, it also kept Wirth from producing a narrative record of her own transnational life that leaves so many gaps and open questions for researchers to grapple with. As the Viennese journalist Richard A. Bermann put it in his obituary of Wirth: “And today, as we mourn this beautiful, clever, and good woman, we must lament, alas, with a different kind of regret, that she, the speedy writer, did not write her multi-faceted, international, and fascinating life, which intersected with the lives of so many great men and famous women. But this old woman was too young to ever seriously think that she should write her memoirs rather than another newspaper article.”Footnote 101 Wirth’s letters to Disraeli offer a snapshot of this intriguing transnational life that presents itself to us in fragments, piques our curiosity, and highlights the need for a more detailed biographical study that shines a light on the subtly transgressive potential, both literally and metaphorically, of Wirth’s authorial persona. They also provide a glimpse of the strategies and tactics of female self-invention with a view to launching a professional writing career. In Wirth’s and other contemporary women writers’ cases, the transnational dimension of her life could be turned into a personal and professional asset—an autobiomyth—that distinctly informed the authorial identity she created through her correspondence. Her abilities and expertise endowed her with a cultural capital that helped her widen her networks and, consequently, carve out a space of opportunity within the normative sociocultural frameworks of her day. Finally, the letters draw our attention to the intrinsically double-edged—since double-voiced—character of such projects. While opening up arenas for expressing alternative female selfhoods and claiming female authorial agency, they also foreground the limitations and strategic compromises that shaped—and curtailed—such agency.
Notes
This research was funded, in whole or in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant doi.org/10.55776/V911. Permission to quote from, and reproduce, any material in copyright has been obtained. In order to ensure lawful use of the works in the UK, Bettina Wirth’s letters to Benjamin Disraeli, held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, have been registered as orphan works under license number OWLS000440. I am grateful to the two anonymous readers for their constructive comments and to Sylvia Mieszkowski and Monika Seidl for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.
