Theodor Fontane and the Daughters of Albion

ONCE when Theodor Fontane, the celebrated nineteenth‐century German poet, was invited by his friend Wilhelm Wolfsohn to write an article about English women, the poet replied that he knew no more about English womenfolk than he knew about Patagonians, that they were large, or about Caribbeans, that they were supposed to eat human flesh. Yet later on, at the beginning of his last and longest stay in England (1855–9) he was prepared to offer his wife a most trenchant criticism on this subject after an encounter with a redoubtable English woman, the sister of an admiral, who ‘shamefully annoyed’ the poet by reproving him for appearing at the breakfast table unshaven.