ABSTRACT
Sophie von la Roche was a German novelist, and mother of eight children. After her husband’s death, she supported herself through her writings, a mark of her economic success. La Roche mainly wrote novels, designed to instruct young women in how to live morally. This excerpt is taken from a travel diary she kept whilst on a ‘Grand Tour’ of England in 1786. The diary was written in German for her children, offering them an educational account of what she saw, customs and manners, those she met, and what she read; it may have been intended to also have been published in her periodical for young women, Pomona. It was translated in 1930 for an English audience. The text is didactic, both in the nature of its observations – largely interesting accounts of geography, conversations or ideas – and in offering a model of polite, Enlightenment femininity for others to emulate. The excerpt below explores her last few days in England. Like the confession in 5, this is less an account of emotion than a source that allows us to see everyday life is threaded with emotional experiences (including boredom), and the way that descriptions of emotion are used to help explain and describe our encounters with the world. This is particularly important in the eighteenth century, where the enlightenment self is meant to demonstrate its sensibility, a characteristic evidenced through our sensitivity and emotional engagement with our environment. La Roche models this sensible self for her reader, as well as assessing the sensibility of various people she observes.
