ABSTRACT
Loneliness at court can never be caused by the sheer absence of other people. Even in the intervals between drawing rooms, levíes and other festivities, a royal household does not allow of much actual solitude, let alone privacy. Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) would have been in daily contact with governesses and tutors, readers and physicians, and higher-ranking employees, such as equerries and ladies of the bedchamber. Nevertheless, in the midst of a bustling court, the queen paradoxically felt condemned to solitude—and craved a little time for herself. She confided her feelings to her brother in a correspondence that offers a unique opportunity to study the queen’s self-assessment of her own solitary condition and the ways and means she found to adapt herself to a different country and different culture and, with that, to the loneliness of an emigrant’s life. Averring that she was made for sociable conversation, she felt excluded from all rational entertainment by the court’s strict etiquette. Barred from literary salons, she began to collect books, among them an interesting number of 18th-century fictional, religious and philosophical explorations of solitude. Using approaches pertaining to the history of emotions, in this paper, I intend to trace what loneliness meant to an elite woman in the Age of Sensibility, how she understood and reflected on it with the help of books and how she turned habitual loneliness into an emotional practice.
