9 - The One and the Many: The Old Mam'selle's Secret and the American Traffic in German Fiction (1868–1917)

Summary

In 1901, Edith Wyatt's short story “A Matter of Taste” offered a snapshot of American reading predilections by means of the book that stands at the center of my investigation in this chapter. Here, an Anglo-American brother and sister view one another's reading with incomprehension. The pretentious Henry reads foreign literature about the Italian Renaissance to his bored sister, Elsie. Elsie, who, the narrator notes with a thrust at the snobbish Henry, has no “Standard,” longs instead for the pleasures of reading E. Marlitt's The Old Mam'selle's Secret. In her preference for Marlitt, Elsie shares the taste of her friend Ottilie Bhaer, a German immigrant, who is reading Marlitt's novel in the original German; Ottilie too has no “Standard.” In the end, the siblings resign themselves to their differences recognizing that “in a various world every one has need of a great deal of patience.”

To paint this gentle portrait of the divergence between American women's and men's reading, on the one hand, and the affinity between American and German women's taste, on the other, Wyatt presciently invoked what was to be the longest-enduring example of nineteenth-century popular German domestic fiction in American translation. First rendered in America in 1868, The Old Mam'selle's Secret (hereafter referred to as OMS) helped to open the American book market to a raft of translations of German domestic fiction in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s—translated fiction that, in the absence of international copyright, proliferated and circulated in multiple editions and reprint editions over the following forty years.