One Woman Writer Everywhere: The Ubiquitous E. Marlitt

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This chapter adopts a data-driven approach to literary history since the German-language writer at its centre, E. Marlitt (= Friederike Christiane Henriette Eugenie John, 1825–1887), was selected as one of the few authors who surfaced in all five literary systems brought together in our collaborative research. After a brief overview of Marlitt’s publication record according to Die Gartenlaube, the German family magazine in which her works were first serialized, the chapter traces the availability of Marlitt’s writing, in both translations and the original German, in Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain, considering different channels of circulation and the complex ways the texts travelled in various multi-lingual environments. This overview is followed by the qualitative study of how Marlitt was received in the Netherlands and read by writers in Slovenia. The expressive quality of her writing was commonly recognized as the key to her success. This characteristic was first appreciated as positive, even ‘virile’, but later devalued as overly sentimental and thus only fit to be read by women and the lower classes, a development that went hand-in-hand with the appearance of cheap, mass-produced editions of her texts. Reading Marlitt’s novels again today, however, reveals the presence of highly controversial socio-political topics, notably the author’s strong positioning on the side of free-thinking Protestantism and against traditional, orthodox forms of both Protestantism and Catholicism. Translating Marlitt for dominantly Catholic countries was therefore a deeply political undertaking, as the close study of French and Spanish translations reveal. The conclusion summarizes the methodological premises of the chapter and argues that we must return to those texts and authors that have become all but invisible if we want to develop a fuller understanding of how shared cultural imaginaries that are still influencing us today were formed in the past.