ABSTRACT
At the age of 29 I was unfortunate to lose my husband and this great calamity made me retreat from the world. I lost all interest in things, life disgusted me, and how I spent those first years I hardly know. By choice I was often alone and so thrown on my own resources, I withdrew from people and affairs and was continually absorbed in the past. Owing to my husband, who had travelled a great deal, my taste and judgement had been changed and developed and owing to the seriousness of life I sought interests and occupations above my years. One day, when I opened a chest which I had brought along from Leeuwarden [the capital of the province of Friesland] on my marriage, I found in it a number of interesting notes, books, letters, rare drawings and my mother’s first housekeeping book started in 1834. In the same chest I also found a beginning of my grandfather’s memoirs; this piece of writing immediately took my interest and from that moment I resolved to start something similar.
