The volume combines three chapters from the fictionalised autobiography of Luisa Hewitt with explanatory material highlighting the role Modern Languages played in the formative last decades of the 19th century, before women were formally admitted to study at Oxford. Luisa Hewitt was the only daughter of the German librarian Heinrich Krebs, born and raised in the librarian's basement flat at the Taylor Institution Library, the Modern Languages Library of the University of Oxford. The memoirs were finished in 1931 and cover the years 1885 to 1897.
For the first time, readers are able to engage with this highly original take on life in and around an Oxford library as seen from below, through the perceptive eyes of a child living among leading Oxford intellectuals. As Hewitt writes: "The following is a true and accurate account of all that I remember to have seen and done and felt from the age of three approximately to the age of seventeen. (...) If in these pages I have given undue prominence to the appearance of people, especially of those who did not please me, if I have made too many hasty & unkind reflections, I wish to disclaim responsibility for them at this date. If any should happen to recognise themselves under fictitious names, I hope they will be lenient where I have been malicious. Let them feel sure that they could repay spite with spite if they had it in them, but that they are too well-bred, or have at any rate forgotten me. As far as possible I give the actual impressions made on me at the time of which I am writing. My expressions are of to-day; my feelings those of forty years ago."
The edition has been prepared by Christina Ostermann, alumna of Modern Languages in Oxford, who collaborated with the current German librarian Emma Huber, the series editor Henrike Lähnemann, and other members of university staff in identifying places and people mentioned in the anonymized account. The edition also includes photographs and drawings of the places and figures discussed in the book from the archival holdings of the Taylor Institution Library.
This edition is part of the 'Writers in Residence' series of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford which publishes literary texts related to the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty in open access. Previous volumes have included texts by Ulrike Draesner, Yoko Tawada, creative translation of feminist German novellas, and a poetry collection based on the encounter with the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann.
