Paper short abstract:

Tracing feelings where they were not supposed to be seen, in the context of memories by the descendants and photos for presentation of the family in the 1890s. The recorder was the professional matron who became wealthy, herself the soldier’s daughter, raised her daughter to be a bourgeois lady.

Paper long abstract:

Between the brief lines of ten daybooks of household work (1890-1914) I trace emotions by the wife and mother Clara (1837-1914). Her family moved from a rural estate into a village adjacent to the local military cantonment. They built a house in the 1890s, taking part in the social life of the community, keeping the household ticking over, notifying each social call. As the parents got on in years, the daughter married. Disaster hit with the death of the daughter in 1913, leaving young children behind. With their mother’s death, the atmosphere of the home changed, as they recalled it. She left a void. In 1914, the keeper of the record passed on. The grandchild became my mother-in-law. She provided context to the diaries of her grandmother – with notes and photo albums from her uncle, d. 1967. She relived and told us of her childhood paradise. Tracing emotions in the perspective of class, I clarify Clara’s strive for social rise, creating a home for a middle-class family – the way possible for the daughter of a soldier, the handmaid who rose to matron and married the owner, inherited the estate, married again. Herself a capable, efficient matron, she raised her daughter to a bourgeois lady. Sarah Ahmed perceives emotion as e-motion, making bodies connect, descendants with grandmother’s narratives, reading great-grandmother’s daybooks, her photos confirming further interpretation. The stable, mobile book-artefacts connect five generations, space and time over a hundred years.

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