Anglo-German Attitudes: Mary, Countess von Bothmer (1833–1901)

Abstract

Mary Young, Countess von Bothmer (1833–1901), an almost completely forgotten English novelist, essayist and political writer, offers an intriguing glimpse of nineteenth-century Anglo-German attitudes. She was a rare but not unique instance of an English woman writer engaging with political ideas and attempting to develop them in fiction, pamphlets and memoirs. While certainly lacking the stature, scholarship or cultural sweep of a George Eliot, she nevertheless displays a cosmopolitan range, commenting on contemporary cultural and political tensions in Europe. An almost exact contemporary of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) and living during a period of close royal links between Britain and Germany, Bothmer tapped into a growing British interest in German life and manners.1 Fully aware of British unease over the rise of Prussia, and herself critical of its militaristic ethos, she nevertheless argued for an Anglo-German entente to maintain and consolidate the European balance of power.2 Her 1876 popular memoir, German Home Life (1876), as well as describing German domestic arrangements, revealed a strong feminist perspective, developed further in her novels. Running alongside her feminism, were Bothmer’s attachment to rigid class hierarchies coupled with the explicit Antisemitism of her essay, “The Jews in Germany” (1881)3. Conversely, her last novel, published in 1883, based on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, is passionately Philo-Semitic. Overall, the Pan-European reach of her writings, based, I will argue, on lived experience and evidence of wide reading in history, politics and literature suggest an unusual and combative intelligence. Her personal history and literary career though idiosyncratic in one sense, also can be construed as typical, not exceptional, of her class and gender. If a minor literary voice, she reveals intriguing links and tensions in Anglo-German relations in the last decades of the nineteenth century.