Queer Places:
La Grande Maison, Grand'Rue 9, 1071 Chexbres, Switzerland

Berthy Moser (1879–1962) was the Swiss friend of Irene Forbes-Mosse. Irene Forbes-Mosse moved in the late 1920s in Switzerland to Chexbres near Montreux. She named her distant cousin, Sissi (Sophie) Brentano (1875–1956), as heiress, this latter was Lujo Brentano's daughter and granddaughter of Christian Brentano, and lived in Prien am Chiemsee. The exchange of marriage letters (1811–1831) between Bettine Brentano and Achim von Arnimescaped escaped from being lost because it was owned by Arnim's granddaughter, Irene Forbes-Mosse. Like Herward Sieberg in his research on them found out, she was the first to plan to present this unknown correspondence in a book and had transcribed it for it; she wrote to her friend Violet Paget (the Writer Vernon Lee) on October 1, 1920 from Munich: "Did I tell you that I had copied the whole correspondence from 1811 to 1831 between my grandfather and grandmother, some of it most beautiful, some very amusing as illustration of those times and about ¾ of the whole just uninteresting stuff about schools and servants and harvest – but I believe I can make a very charming volume out of it – only, who knows if I will find a publisher."

After her death in 1946, Berthy Moser took care of the manuscripts. Part of it was printed in 1961.


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