Faust Symphony Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, "Anything having to do with Goethe is dangerous for me to handle." However, the final catalyst for the symphony came in a two-month period between August and October 1854. This period coincided with a visit to Weimar by English novelist Mary Ann (Marian) Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot. Her consort George Henry Lewes was gathering information for his biography of Goethe. During visits to Liszt's residence, the Altenburg, Lewes and Eliot had several discussions with both him and Princess Carolyne about Goethe and his place in German literature. Once Liszt began writing,
Mary Ann Hanway Mary Ann Hanway Mary Ann Hanway was an eighteenth-century travel writer and novelist. She has been proposed as the anonymous author of "Journey to the Highlands of Scotland" (1777). Hanway was also the author of "Christabelle, the Maid of Rouen" (1814), in which a woman's father loses their family's fortune, and she joins a nunnery, "Ellinor" (1798), and "Andrew Stuart" (1800). Hanway did not always find the process of writing easy, declaring in the preface to her 1809 novel "Falconbridge Abbey", that "four years it has been procrastinated, from a series of ill health, having laid dormant in my desk