Barbara Burns

Wilhelm Meinhold, 'The Amber Witch'. Translated by Lady Duff Gordon Barbara Burns

Wilhelm Meinhold's Gothic romance Maria Schweidler: Die Bernsteinhexe (1844) was a seminal German text in the literary landscape of Victorian England. The 1846 English translation by Lady Duff Gordon, entitled The Amber Witch, enjoyed widespread popular success, and Meinhold's suspenseful tale of a guileless young woman, unjustly accused of witchcraft, was hailed as the leading German novel of its day. Written in the style of a seventeenth-century chronicle, the story appealed to a readership which identified in Meinhold's work echoes of Daniel Defoe, Oliver Goldsmith and Walter Scott. This volume makes available for the first time in a critical edition a literary translation which transformed the German text into a cult classic in English, and suggests ways in which this work resonated with trends in Victorian culture. Duff Gordon's accomplished rendering of what was perceived as an untranslatable text made Meinhold's novel accessible to new generations of readers. Affording an insight into the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and the superstition and miscarriages of justice which marked the peak of the witch-hunting period in Early Modern Europe, this translation should generate continuing momentum and impact for Meinhold's original German novel.