Serving up a treat

Promising comfort is what a good stew should offer – but boeuf en daube, from Provence, with its cragged hunks of meat bespangled with olives and doused in shimmering, sepia-coloured broth, yields (if cooked correctly) exceptional pleasures. Or at least Mr Bankes in To the Lighthouse thinks so: “He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked”.

In Europe in British Literature and Culture, Petra Rau, one of the volume’s editors, opens her chapter about French food on British tables with the “raptures” over boeuf en daube that Virginia Woolf permits Mr Bankes to enjoy. He and his friend Mrs Ramsay are in agreement regarding the inferiority of the native cuisine to the continental. It is also notable, as Mildred the cook and Marthe the Swiss maid will know, for its serious preparation time. Such observations prepare the way for Rau’s consideration of the various responses to French (and European) cooking across British history, as well as the “remarkable assimilation of continental and (formerly) colonial cuisine”, and the contradictory British ignorance and scorn towards French fare as “insubstantial and somehow suspicious”.

It is unsurprising to learn that Europe in British Literature and Culture, with its attention to such complexities – imports and exports, negotiations, trade-offs, rejections – belongs to a series of books “conceived in the long, slow aftermath of the Brexit referendum of 2016”. As the series editor, Gill Plain, notes in her preface, Brexit “awoke long-dormant phobias, reactivating the expression of attitudes and opinions previously muted”. Opinions on, for example, the EU (with its reputation, noted by Rau and her co-editor, William T. Rossiter, for being “unwieldy and bureaucratic … reductionist in its emphasis on Western values, addicted to neo-liberalist capitalism, profoundly anti-Muslim in stance, and incapable of offering a truly collective sense of identity”), to which the Brexit project served as an inept rejoinder (“a week after the referendum, the word ‘Brexit’ mutated … what it meant and what shape it should take was yet to be negotiated”). As well as recent matters, however, this volume offers an expansive summary of interactions, starting with “the first settlers on what we now call mainland Britain [who] arrived after the Ice Age on the eastern coast via Doggerland”, and going on to a succession of invasions, periods of isolation, alliances, further interventions and wars – accompanied by “competing, contingent conceptions of what and who constituted Britain, and who did not, and when”.

Rau and Rossiter note the longstanding scholarly interest in this multifaceted subject, exemplified by Eric Hobsbawm’s Ages series (1962–94), Norman Davies’s Europe: A history (1996) and Shane Weller’s The Idea of Europe (2021). Europe in British Literature and Culture takes an interdisciplinary, international approach to the study of the longue durée. Twenty-four chapters (by British and European scholars) are divided into four sections: “topographical and geopolitical case studies of influence”; “pan-European moods and cultural movements”; “specific fields or instances of cultural transfer”; and “more recent expressions of anxiety and uncertainty”. “Literature and culture” here entail not just boeuf en daube, but also the contrarieties of British and European literary theory (as discussed by Hans Bertens), the early modern book trade (Thomas Roebuck) and British authors who “imagined Europe as an elsewhere that requires diplomatic handling and clandestine infiltration … a partner to be coaxed, a foe to be appeased, or a neighbour to be managed with particular care” (Allan Hepburn).

As a whole this book therefore amounts to a sprawling account of Europe’s influence, covering both canonical and non-canonical ground. Zoë Kinsley reconsiders Grand Tour writing, tracing modern ideas about travel literature back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedents such as Joseph Addison’s letters about exploring Italy between 1699 and 1704, and Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768). These works may be set by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “posthumously published epistolary account of her diplomatic journey into the Ottoman Empire in 1716–18” and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), both of which “challenged readers’ ideas about Europe as it had been familiarized through the Grand Tour”. More generally, for women “travel to the continent … had the potential to enhance their status and authority”. As Kinsley notes, Lady Anna Miller, Hester Piozzi and Lady Elizabeth Howard “attempted to use their Grand Tour souvenir collections to shape and establish a particular kind of cosmopolitan identity when they returned to Britain”.

Barbara Korte, meanwhile, presents case studies of two pairs of writers – Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Howitt, and Julian Barnes and Adam Thorpe – and considers what took them abroad and the place of “European cultures and languages” in their work. Howitt, for one, began to learn German in 1829 “because she loved foreign literature”, well before making a home in Heidelberg in 1840, and staying for three years. Her family’s “main motive was their children’s education”: in her autobiography Howitt described how she and her husband “sought German acquaintance” and “followed German customs”, hence “immersing themselves in the country”. They “used the time abroad to advance their career as translators of German literature”. Germany was also a place of “Catholic folk piety”, which Howitt again found in Italy in 1870. Unlike Browning, who became involved in Italy’s “struggle for freedom from foreign rule – like many of her compatriots”, Howitt saw Italy as “a climate ‘fitting to old age’”. It was here that she “converted, a few years before her death, to Roman Catholicism”.

As Rau and Rossiter admit, there are omissions here. Poland and Russia are not covered in the first section, for example, as they “did not exert the same amount of influence as France or Germany”. This is an oversight, especially given recent work by Thomas McLean (2012) and Rebecca Beasley (2020) on the significance of those nations to British literature and culture. The volume could also have mentioned critical analysis of their supposedly limited influence, as in Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). The focus in some chapters on countries and in others on regions (because “some nations can be more meaningfully grouped together”), though attentive to the different definitions and influences of these regions, notably condenses the complex histories of individual nations. Alex Drace-Francis’s chapter carefully explores both the Balkans and British Ruritanian stereotypes, giving a rich history of depictions from 1600 to the present – but the conjunction of real and fictional states sits a little oddly. “The myth of British Exceptionalism has caused real, long-lasting disruption and damage to both communities”, the reader learns; but at least in this long history it is possible to see Brexit “not as a conclusion … but merely as an (admittedly poorly scripted) episode in a complicated relationship”.

Juliette Bretan is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, researching depictions of Poland and East Central Europe in twentieth-century anglophone and Polish literature

The post Serving up a treat appeared first on TLS.