Understanding Heloise's 'Family Notes'

Young woman meets nice young man with a steady job, travels to a distant country to marry him, gets homesick, detests her new homeland and the majority of its people, feels isolated, has difficult pregnancies, suffers some infant deaths, dies in childbirth.

Reduced to its basics, Heloise Höchner's life after Grillparzer is nothing out of the ordinary for the 19th century woman. Women left their families for the sake of their husbands, women had to experience painful pregnancies, stillbirths and infant deaths. Few women were economically independent, though a substantial dowry was always helpful in finding Mr Right. But very few women of this period or before document their joys and miseries in the way Heloise has done in her 'Family Notes'.

The reader of Heloise's 'Family Notes' will be moved by her sufferings, but will encounter numerous puzzles when reading her account of her life in Jassy. She is remarkably detailed and informative about her childbearing and her own feelings and moods, but hardly ever gives us the wider context we need to understand her situation properly.

She mentions often her friendlessness and isolation in Jassy, but gives us no specifics. This isolation must surely make the disasters and setbacks in her family life much harder to bear. In addition to that, her husband is prone to his own depressive states, making her feel duty bound to put on a happy face and internalise all her own suffering in order not to drive him deeper into his blackness.

Let's now try and understand that wider context that caused her so much sadness. We have hardly any evidence. It is nearly all guesswork and speculation, but at least plausible guesswork.

As part of that task I am also trying to restore Heloise as an historical person. She is hardly mentioned in the Grillparzer biography. Her marriage to Costinescu and the move to Jassy take her into the undocumented backwoods of a turbulent region. Had someone not transcribed her 'Family Notes' before the original and other artefacts went up in flames, her marrried existence would have been almost a complete blank.

We find nothing that anyone wrote about her after her death. From her 'loyal friend' Ermione, otherwise a noted scribbler, we have no word about her. Even son Emil, the great statesman, appears to have told us nothing about his mother Heloise – of course, he was very young when she died. Her husband, Alexander, is an historical footnote who, as far as we know, left no record of her. We don't even know the date of her death. She simply disappeared.

Well, she exists now, albeit with many loose ends.