Literary Love Tourism in the Long Nineteenth Century

Tolstoy’s Lucerne: Writing Life, Living Art

Philip Bullock

The short prose piece, Lucerne, that Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1857 was the product of his first trip abroad. Predating such major work as War and Peace and Anna Karenina by a decade and more, it nonetheless contains the germs of many of the key ideas that would obsess Tolstoy for the rest of his life. There are ironic comments on civilised - and soulless - European travellers (particularly the English), meditations on the affective power of art to move, and reflections on the nature of divine love.  This paper will subject the text to a detailed close reading, arguing that for all his reputation as the author of what Henry James called "loose, baggy monsters", Tolstoy was the master of acutely observed short prose."

The journey to Carthage in the footsteps of Salammbô and Mathô

Clément Dessy, Université Libre, Bruxelles

Since its publication in 1862, Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's historical and Orientalist novel, has been a success, as evidenced by the many illustrated editions and stage adaptations of the work. Flaubert, who travelled to Carthage and did extensive research for the novel, was not concerned with accuracy, but with the authenticity of the universe he created. The love story of Salammbô and the mercenary Mathô has inspired generations of readers who have travelled to Tunisia to discover the signs of a fictional world that never existed. They sought it out so much that a district of Tunis was named after the novel's eponymous character. Among these reader-travellers were many writers, including Guy de Maupassant, Jean Lorain, André Gide and Isabelle Eberhardt, whose journeys to Tunisia were transformed by reading the novel and by the power of desire inspired by Salammbô in the mercenary Mathô. In their travelogues, they try to flesh out the fictional character in the real world that unfolds before their eyes, finding real evidence of a dream called Salammbô.

Proust and Venice : Falling in and out of Love

Emily Eells, Paris Nanterre

This paper will focus on the chapter ‘Staying in Venice’ in the penultimate volume of Remembrance of Things Past, stressing how Proust negates the cliché of Venice as a place for romantic love. His Narrator longs to go to Venice - alone, without his lover -, in order to pursue his study of Ruskin’s work.  It is in Venice that he becomes indifferent to the loss of his loved one, Albertine, and where his love for his mother comes to the fore.

The Poetry of the Past: On Vernon Lee’s Footsteps in Limbo

Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College, University of Oxford)

‘There is no doubt that wandering about in the haunts of the past undisturbed by the knowledge of the present is marvellously favourable to the historic, the poetical emotion.’ This is one of Vernon Lee’s many reflections on the emotion of travel in Limbo, one of her less studied collections of essays. Lee was always on the move and travel for her was more than an act of leisure: it was a core part of her identity and work as writer and critic. The essays in Limbo convey her deep personal investment in travel by deploying a wide spectrum of literary references, ranging from Dante to Verlaine, by means of which Lee superimposes a literary map on her topography of Italy and other European countries. Tracing her literary footsteps in Limbo enables us to uncover the complex dynamics between book and place in her travel writing, which is in fact often a meta-reflection on travel and a form of autobiography of the emotions, as well as her critique of the relationship between tourism and cosmopolitanism.

Making Room: Building Den Ensommes Hjem,The Home of the Lonely

Helene Grøn, University of Copenhagen

Pre-empting Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own by some 60 years, Danish Mathilde Fibiger (1830-1872) asks in her 1868 essay Den Ensommes Hjem (The Home of the Lonely) where women who wish to work and write could live. By then, Fibiger had survived not only living in poverty from a stubborn desire to be self sufficient in a time where, as Pauline Worm noted, marriage was a ‘en handel, en forsørgelsesordning’ (a trade, a maintenance-arrangement) for women (in Bajer 1879, 98), but also the scandal surrounding the treatment of love in her two literary productions: Clara Raphaels 12 Breve about an emancipated woman who choses freedom over love, and Minona, full of broken relationships and transgressive love, the crown of which is two estranged siblings falling romantically for each other. In the early 1900s, Thora Daugaard, a telegraphist, translator and editor of prominent Copenhagen women’s magazines had read Fibiger’s Clara Raphaels 12 Breve. Being part of international women’s movements for peace and liberation, Daugaard was inspired both by ways of co-living in London, and by Mathilde’s book. In 1920, Clara Raphaels House stood ready for single, professional women to move in and make a home. Taking for granted that love-stories can spill over their pages into people’s travel destinations and love-lives, this paper asks how literature influences place in ‘making room’ for women who wished to live and create outside the structural opportunities for love and home available to them in the long 19th Century.

Love for Literature, Love for the Self? Literary Love Tourism in France

Richard Hibbitt, University of Leeds

The widespread and popular phenomenon of writers’ houses – maisons d’écrivain – shows that literary tourism in France is very popular, including those belonging to many writers of the long nineteenth century, such as Balzac, Bourget, Chateaubriand, Colette, Alphonse Daudet, Alexandre Dumas, Hugo, Mallarmé, Proust, Rostand, Sand, and Zola. Yet despite this popularity, at first sight there appear to be fewer examples of literary love tourism in France. This may be because there are fewer obvious couples and love stories which attract visitors in the way they do to Haworth, Verona or Lake Leman, despite some attempts to designate Héloïse and Abelard as the ‘French Romeo and Juliet’. In Paris, tourists seem to be more in love with the city itself, epitomised by the practice of couples attaching padlocks adorned with their names to the Pont Neuf and other locations. Or is French literature, as John Lanchester argues, too concerned with money and sex to provide us with love stories? This paper will adumbrate the initial premises of literary love tourism in France by suggesting that it is readers’ love for the works of writers such as George Sand and Proust that inspire these pilgrimages: celebrating love for literature as a form of love for the self, whether solitary or not.

A Bridge Across England and Austria: Literary Love Letters and Female Authorship

Sandra Mayer (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

The personal papers of Benjamin Disraeli in the Bodleian Library contain large boxes of ‘fan letters’ by ordinary members of the public, written in response to Disraeli’s novels Lothair (1870) and Endymion (1880). Carefully preserved letters by correspondents from all over Europe and the United States allow for fascinating glimpses into the tactics of ‘imagined intimacy’ as a central component of nineteenth-century literary celebrity culture to camouflage, or at least alleviate, the anonymising effects of radically expanding commercial publishing and mass readership.

This collection also contains a remarkable sequence of six letters by a young woman from Vienna, the writer, translator, and journalist Bettina Wirth (1849-1926). Written in impeccable English and adorned by delicate drawings, the letters – sent to Disraeli in 1880/81 – are fascinating documents that are more than flamboyant expressions of ardent hero-worship and romantic attachment. In fact, they offer revealing insights not only into the gendered dynamics of fandom and cultural mediation, but the ways in which transnational practices – mobility, cultural knowledge, command of foreign languages, epistolary network-building, and translation – could be skillfully employed to carve out a niche for female authorship in the male-dominated domains of cultural production.

In this paper, I look at letter-writing as a substitute for actual travelling, with a capacity to transcend national, cultural as well as social, linguistic, and gender-specific boundaries. I will argue that Wirth’s letters to Disraeli functioned as a transnational space of self-invention and self-affirmation that allowed a budding female writer to negotiate her authorial agency within the dominant socio-cultural frameworks and gender ideologies of the day. Framed as romantic identification and submissive infatuation by a young woman writer with an eminent novelist and statesman, Wirth’s letters ultimately present an attempt to assert her identity as an author.

Love and Death in Bruges and Venice: Georges Rodenbach Bruges La Morte (1892) and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912)

Lene Østermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen

Twenty years separate the two novellas by a Belgian and a German author respectively which both contain the names of cities and ‘la morte’/‘Der Tod’ in their titles. Both texts deal with travellers to cities which by the turn of the century had acquired the status as dead cities, ghosts testifying to a glorious past of trade and commerce, dependent on the sea and geopolitical factors, but now abandoned as empty beautiful shells of former life. The love tourism of Rodenbach’s Hugues Viane and Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach revolve around death and cause death: in Viane’s case, his retreat to Bruges is to find a suitable setting for the mourning of his dead wife and the relics associated with her, while the city also provides the framework for his erotic engagement with her doppelgänger, a young actress dramatically killed at the very end of the text. Memory, eros and chaos conflate with place, with the city abandoned by the sea in the fifteenth century. By contrast, Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice in search of artistic inspiration and finds Platonic love in the prepubescent Polish Tadzio, reflected against the sea in a dead city, constantly threated by being submerged in water, while disease lays the streets empty. The death of the author and the escape of the beloved preserve eros in a Platonic framework while the dead and dying and poisonous city reaches dangerously into the twentieth century. I would like to speculate about the ways in which Bruges and Venice as sites of love and death at the fin de siècle can be linked together in a meaningful way as places of the mirroring and reflecting of the twosomeness which is the key ingredient of romantic love.

“We see them and rejoice”: Michael Field in Dresden

Ana Parejo-Vadillo, Birkbeck College, University of London

In 1891, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper travelled to Dresden as if they were a newly married couple on their honeymoon, with suitcases engraved with their initials M.F. They went to study the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister for a book of poems on pictures they were researching for, and which will be eventually published by the Bodley Head as Sight and Song in 1892. But a study of their diary for 1891 makes clear that the poets were interested in Dresden’s art for other reasons. Art tourism was central for those looking for new ideals of love at the turn of the century and Michael Field’s trip to the Gemäldegalerie was indicative of the poets’ intention to study love that dared to be painted and with which they could identify.

The trip and their vision of paintings that expressed non-normative love took an unexpected turn when Edith Cooper fell ill with scarlet fever. Taken to hospital, where she was interned for a period, Cooper was sexually accosted by a female nurse.  The experience was for both Bradley and Cooper deeply transformative, not only because Bradley witnessed Cooper’s relations with the nurse, but also because Cooper would acquire in the process a new identity, being called Henry from then on. In this paper, I discuss what Dresden meant for the poets, the painted love they found in the gallery, and the way they would portray ‘love’ in their diaries and poetry. 

Mina Loy's “Three Moments in Paris”: Love, Tourism, Consumerism.

Laura Scuriatti, Bard College, Berlin

This paper offers a reading of Mina Loy's poetic sequence ‘Three Moments in Paris’ (1914), with particular focus the central poem ‘Café du Néant’, in which two lovers are observed in the unlikely environment of the Cabaret du Néant, a death-themed cabaret. The three poems rewrite the myth of Paris as the city of love, as well as the love lyric as expressed by lyric sequences, presenting three versions of love stories that are either mired by misogyny, spectacle and consumerism. 

Literary Tourism and Love in Berlin: Beyond the Male Experience

Gesa Stedman, Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Berlin does not lend itself immediately to literary tourism. There is no single writer’s house which attracts travellers or cult followers. However, the Anglophone Berlin myth based on W.H. Auden’s, Christopher Isherwood’s and Stephen Spender’s carefully crafted poetry, fiction, and memoirs has led visitors to follow in their footsteps and to explore parts of Berlin such as Schöneberg or Kreuzberg, or even to settle there themselves, trying to recreate the 1920s and 30s experience and in some cases, turning that into art of their own. At first glance, women writers do not seem to be part of the picture as if they never experienced Berlin in the connection of important romantic entanglements and love. My paper explores the connection between Berlin and love in George Eliot’s, Alix Strachey’s, and Vita Sackville-Wests’s and Virginia Woolf’s writings, ranging from elopement to pragmatic long-distance relationships, and unwanted separations mixed with local love affairs. As these texts are much more ephemeral (letters, journals), they have not had an impact on later generations of visitors, nor to any considerable exten on later generations of writers. But the spaces these female authors created in writing and the manner in which their romantic relationships were associated with these spaces are worth a closer look, and present interesting points of departure when compared to the Berlin texts written by men. Romantic love for English women writers in the city translates into Berlin texts which focus on the woman as intellectual, and into metaphorical spaces and associated objects which allow the writers to embody the roles of the intellectual and writer.