The aversion to the thought of being regarded as a learned woman burdened my young soul even then as it continues to do now, no matter how many praiseworthy things my candidate told me about Madame Dacier and Professor Gottsched, who on top of that was my countrywoman. [ . . . ]
On beautiful summer evenings, when the children had been sent to bed, when my father smoked his evening pipe under the chestnut tree that shaded our perron and my mother sat quietly and graciously beside him, Jameson, who never failed to turn up, showed me the stars, as far as the limited horizon permitted us to observe them. [ . . . ]
I also had to calculate the longitudinal and latitudinal positions of the various countries; I could tell him precisely what the clock had struck in Paris or Archangel when it was three in the afternoon here. He was able to tell me something about every butterfly, every bug that buzzed by. Thus, I was learning constantly; I have forgotten most of it, but I got used to paying attention to what happened around me, not staring into the world thoughtlessly. [ . . . ]
Meanwhile I had gained, quite unnoticed, almost as much command of the English language as of my native German; I read and understood and spoke it with great proficiency. From the Spectator, the Tales of the Genii, and the letters of the Lady Montague, Jameson moved on to the poets, and a world abundant with warm, delightful life opened up to me.
[ . . . ]
Romans, Greeks, Shakespeare, and Homer, what chaos all of that had to wreak in such a girl’s head! Even though Kuschel and Jameson did everything to counter it, I was surely in extreme danger of becoming an unbearably high-strung and cranky little person, a type of educated young woman. But luckily a new appearance saved me from this; a publication to whom I, my contemporaries then, our children, and in part even our grandchildren owe so incredibly much.
It was Weissen’s Kinderfreund [Children’s Friend], which had only just appeared on the scene. It was this excellent, still unsurpassed work that, whenever my poetic exaltation threatened to become overly effusive, always led me back to the element in which I belonged after all, in the quiet, pleasant child’s world, which at that very time was gradually liberated from the heavy yoke of miserable pedantry and ignorant severity, under which it had groaned up to then. [ . . . ]
[The society of young ladies]
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