Chapter 3 - Networked Families in Germany

Summary

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.