For more than a dozen years, I have been compiling evidence of the ownership and readership of Macintosh’s book. It is only now, in turning to write about the book’s reception in ernest, and to think in connected ways about who encountered Travels and what they made of it, that the underrepresentation (or what I presume to be the underrepresentation) of women readers becomes particularly obvious. While I have previously identified women who owned the book (like Gustava Eleonora Lindahl [née Gjörwell]) or who sold it (like Catherine Finn), it was only yesterday that—for the first time—I encountered definitive evidence of a woman who actually read it. This was Luise von Göchhausen, chief lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia, patron of Weimar Classicism.

von Göchhausen read Travels (in English) in 1784, having borrowed a copy of the book from Johann Gottfried Herder in the late summer. Others in Herder’s circle were also queuing up to borrow it, most notably Karl Ludwig von Knebel, to whom Herder promised the book just as soon as it was returned. Although we do not know what von Göchhausen made of the book, her reading is important evidence of the book’s reach and circulation, particularly beyond Germanophone scholars of human difference, who were the principal readers of the 1782 London edition in the German-speaking states. As ever, there is more digging to do, and more stories to be uncovered.