ABSTRACT
This essay is a study in affinities, not sources and influences, but those affinities are not simply a matter of a reader's impressions. Leo Tolstoy and Theodor Fontane read George Eliot, in English, and admired her. Tolstoy lists George Elliot (sic) as one of the authors who made a 'Great' impression on him, between the age of thirty-five and fifty. (The only novelists to make a greater, an 'Enormous' impression, were Dickens in David Copperfield and Victor Hugo in Les Miserables.)1 He picked out Scenes of Clerical Life and Felix Holt for special praise, and unlike Fontane, he felt sympathetic towards George Eliot's inheritance of the English puritan tradition.2 Fontane spent several years in England, in the forties and fifties, knew the work of Scott and Dickens well, was a journalist who made a special study of the English press — just when Marian Evans was at the height of her journalistic powers, though writing anonymously — and reported on English culture as part of his official responsibility to the Zentralpressestelle and the German ambassador. Since I first read Effi Briest I have felt sure that he read and was influenced by George Eliot, and this is confirmed by Charlotte Jolles, in her M.A. thesis for the University of London, 'Theodor Fontane and England: A Critical Study in Anglo-German Literary Relations' (1947), which quotes a reference to George Elliot (sic) in which Fontane praises her for combining 'detail' with 'Komposition', though he anticipates Henry James in complaining that the details are too many and too minute. David Malcolm, in his Ph.D. thesis, 'Contemporary and Radical Themes in George Eliot's and Theodor Fontane's
Fictions' (London, 1981) tells us that this is Fontane's one reference to her, in a letter of 10 June 1862.3 Like Thackeray's influence on Fontane, which Jolles discusses, George Eliot's remains a matter of speculation, particularly since Fontane would have responded to her not only directly, but indirectly, through other European novels. The known links with the greatest Russian and the greatest German realist of the century make a comparative reading especially interesting.
