Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

Mary Howitt, Anna Mary Howitt, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who knew Jameson, extended her cross-cultural exchange across several genres left untouched by their precursor. Unlike Jameson, Howitt’s and Gaskell’s maternal roles were factors in their Anglo–German exchange. Mary Howitt authored a young adult novel set in Heidelberg (Which is the Wiser?) in which ethnoexocentrism is central to courtship. Another novella, Margaret von Ehrenberg, the Artist-Wife, drew upon her daughter Anna Mary’s experiences and writings as an art student in Munich; it addresses troubled marriage and the importance of professions for women. Anna Mary Howitt’s memoir An Art-Student in Munich is structured by the writer’s growth from narrow English national and religious identity to openness to Germans’ cultural, class, and religious differences, and by her movement from a marginalised foreign female art student to her acceptance as a German art student at the climactic artist’s ball. Gaskell adapts Anglo–German cultural exchange to probe the dangers posed by intercultural courtship and to innovate gender reversals in female and male characters in two short stories that draw on sensation fiction and German idyl.

Jameson’s writings modelled ethnoexocentrism and cultural exchange and reflected the cross-cultural freedoms and opportunities she enjoyed as a result of her interchange with Germany and Ottilie von Goethe. Her three resulting ‘German’ books advanced feminist agendas in England by way of German models. Visits and Sketches (1834) details the empowerment of Jameson as writer, cultural critic, and intellectual underwritten by solo travels and her commentaries on German women’s literature, art, intellectual exchange, and sociability. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) represents Jameson’s fullest command of contemporary German letters, often by way of writers and thinkers such as Rahel, who were underestimated or ignored by English masculine writers on German culture. Her cultural exchange with Ojibwa women including June Schoolcraft and Schoolcraft’s mother, while more limited, built in part upon the ethnoexocentrism she had learned to exercise in Germany. Social Life in Germany represents Jameson’s work as a translator but, more important, her recourse to German models for alternative marriage and divorce practices she tacitly endorsed for Britain. Her subsequent writings, while not focusing so exclusively on Germany, still drew upon the freedoms and opportunities she discovered there.

This chapter reads the canonical novel Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, and lesser-known novel The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill, in conversation with each other and with the fiction of German-Jewish author Paul Heyse, to which a single episode of Eliot’s may be indebted, while Fothergill draws on Heyse’s 1873 Kinder der Welt throughout in plot, structure, and gendered characters. Both British novels feature dual narrators and plots and exemplify Anglo–German exchange, especially in relation to opera and German music. But whereas Gwendolyn Harleth fails at a music career and marriage, Fothergill’s first five of six books comprise a New Woman plot of a single woman refusing mercenary marriage to pursue a career: protagonist and English narrator May Wedderburn studies music abroad, with the talent and drive to succeed, and lives alone. The sixth book, however, modulates from a New Woman story to heterosexual romance and marriage. Complicating this outcome are Fothergill’s dual plot and her second, male German narrator, the romantic friend of the novel’s protagonist, the German concertmaster whom May loves. The novel thus mixes heterosexual romance, queer masculinity, and queer romance, giving male love the last word and qualifying conventional Victorian happy endings.

Three Anglo–German Edwardian novels of Elizabeth von Arnim, Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905), and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), perform expatriate identity as theorised by Edward Said. Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), in contrast, is the most English of early novels by English-born German citizen von Arnim. The restlessness and contrapuntal perspectives of expatriate consciousness generate humour in the 1904 and 1905 novels, and in-depth adoption of an alternate German–Anglo subjectivity in Rose-Marie Schmidt. Fräulein Schmidt, von Arnim’s most sophisticated novel to that point, adopts the first-person epistolary narrative of a German professor’s daughter reared in a lower-middle-class home as she finds independence, self-respect, and a writer’s voice after being proposed to, then jilted, by a young Englishman. A subliminal narrative coursing beneath the surface of Rose-Marie’s letters limn the protagonist’s underlying psychological processes.

An important factor in progressive Victorian women’s interest in Germany is the decades-long friendship of Anna Jameson and Ottilie von Goethe, in itself a sustained form of cultural exchange and a bond that opened cultural exchange to others in Germany and England. First exploring the backgrounds of Jameson’s and Goethe’s openness to other cultures and foreigners (Jameson’s Anglo-Irish heritage, the German and English reading circles of Goethe and her mother), the chapter turns to Goethe’s friendship circle and the erotic same-sex relationship of Adele Schopenhauer, who had fallen in love with Goethe as a young woman, and Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen. These two were attracted to Jameson, who responded warmly to Mertens-Schaaffhausen. Jameson herself fell in love with Goethe on meeting her, though Goethe’s heteronormativity precluded reciprocal feelings, and desire modulated into deep, steadfast friendship from 1833 until Jameson’s death. The chapter then traces the phases and significance of this friendship, including Jameson’s willingness for almost two years to risk her career and income to accompany Goethe to Vienna when the widowed Goethe became pregnant out of wedlock and gave birth to a daughter she named after Jameson.

In their public and private writings, lesbian poets Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Amy Levy reflected the greater freedoms, including university education and physical mobility, of the New Woman. They travelled in Germany and Switzerland for professional development, aesthetic stimulation, and leisure. Europe as an aesthetic theatre underwrote new poems and provided imaginative stimuli for Michael Field, but they also moved from Anglocentric to Anglo-German perspectives and ethnoexocentrism during extended stays in Germany, when they also enhanced their German skills. The private writings of Amy Levy and Michael Field both mention the sexual danger that could accompany foreign travel. Katharine Bradley’s The New Minnesinger (1875) also shared interests in translation with Levy. Levy began translating German poets while attending Newnham College, Cambridge; Germany and German language became most closely associated for her with Heine and the Jewish identity she shared with him. Her travels additionally inspired minor short fiction susceptible to normative or queer readings. Queer sexuality also informs poems she inscribed to Vernon Lee, whom she loved; this cluster also reflects Levy’s in-depth cultural exchange with the poetry of Heine.

Best known for her links to Italy, where she moved at eighteen, Vernon Lee was a Pan-European who viewed western Europe as a single entity unified by shared culture and history despite local languages and customs. Born into an expatriate family, she learned multiple languages as her family shifted residences during her youth, including stays in Germany and Switzerland. More important, Vernon Lee’s wonder and imagination were awakened by her German-speaking Bernese governess who taught her German fairy tales and legends as well as history and literature; the governess also imparted a profound experience of female love. This chapter posits Lee’s foundational German-related childhood experiences as key to her psychological, sexual, and imaginative formation; her supernatural and historical writing; and her sexuality. After demonstrating the Anglo–German conversation of Lee’s supernatural tales, especially ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Woman’, with German lore and the romantic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the chapter focuses on the novella Ottilie (1883) as a site of Lee’s conceptualisation of haunted historical narrative. It concludes with a feminist reading of Ottilie and proposes the novella’s suitability as an imagined history of Ottilie von Goethe.

An iconoclast in religion and marriage in 1854–5, Marian Evans, later George Eliot, was a more conventional female traveller than her precursors in Chapters 2 and 3 due to her limited listening and speaking skills and her reliance on her partner George Henry Lewes for travel arrangements and social contacts. Her potential for cultural exchange was also limited by her desire to avoid encountering scandalous gossip that had followed her from England. Evans’s discernibly greater interest in German intellectual men than women additionally meant that she neither had nor took the opportunity to form a female friendship network in the mid-1850s. Thus, unlike Jameson or Howitt, she never met Goethe or Goethe’s friends (aside from Fanny Lewald). Eliot’s limited ethnoexocentrism also manifested itself in her public and private writing about German Jews, most notably Heinrich Heine. The chapter analyses in detail one of Evans/Eliot’s best-known essays, ‘German Wit’, in which Evans erases Heine’s Jewish identity to posit him as a German writer qualified to succeed Johann von Goethe in greatness. Though she would later have known about Heine’s Jewish origins, they remained erased when she revised her 1855 anonymous essay into George Eliot’s posthumously published essay of 1884.