Characteristics of Women and their Reception in Germany

Abstract

As with many other aspects of human activity, the role played by women in Anglo-German cultural relations, though it should be immediately obvious to anyone who concerns herself even cursorily with the subject, is not acknowledged as regularly or as explicitly as it should be.1 On the contrary, it is often downplayed, consciously or unconsciously, with correspondingly unedifying results. The purpose of this essay is to point up one small example of such behaviour. It therefore takes as its theme a text by a woman, which in its time was enormously influential, notably in Germany, but which has subsequently been disparaged and/or ignored, so that it is nowadays known, if at all, only to genuine experts or feminists. And it uses the work’s German reception to illustrate the ways in which the works of women have been, and continue to be treated in the masculinist culture of Western Europe. The woman in question is Anna Brownell Jameson, née Murphy, and the text is the one cited in my title. 2 She lived between 1794 and 1860 – that is, roughly between A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The English Woman’s Journal – and her biography is as easy to summarize as it must have been hard to construct. She was born in Ireland but moved to England when she was four, and lived there, more or less, for the rest of her life. From the age of 16 she worked as a governess, a job that enabled her to visit Italy, the country in which she set her first succès de scandale, the Diary of an Ennuyée.3 In 1825 she married – but when her husband Robert was appointed Chief Justice of Dominica four years later, she did not join him there. In 1836 she did follow him to Canada – but rather than