Louisa Gurney Hoare

Louisa Gurney Hoare (25 September 1784 – 6 September 1836) was an English diarist and writer on education, and a member of the Gurney family.

Louisa Gurney, born on 25 September 1784, was the seventh of the eleven children of John Gurney (1749–1809) of Earlham Hall near Norwich, a Quaker, and of Catherine Bell (1754–1792). Her father inherited ownership of Gurney's Bank in Norwich. Her siblings included Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer, Joseph John Gurney (1788–1847) and Samuel Gurney (1786–1856), philanthropists, and Daniel Gurney (1791–1880), banker and antiquary. They were educated privately, at first by their mother and then by Catherine Bell Gurney, the eldest sister, according to her mother's precepts. The regimen of play, adult conversation and free use of Earlham library was at variance with the Quaker traditions of that period. They were permitted to explore other religions and had both Unitarian and Roman Catholic friends, partly through the Norwich school to which Joseph John was sent, where his sisters also attended some lessons.

All the children were encouraged to keep diaries or "journals of conscience". Louisa's was the most avidly kept. It recorded adolescent enthusiasms for nature, music, and politics, and her aversion to the duller aspects of Quaker observance, and to any unjust treatment of herself or her brothers and sisters. She wrote that she was disgusted when a twelve-year-old second cousin of hers kissed her, but she later married him, the 23-year-old banker Samuel Hoare (1783–1847) of Hampstead, on 24 December 1806 at Tasborough Meeting House in Norfolk.

The marriage was strongly supported by her father-in-law, also Samuel Hoare. According to her sister-in-law, "I know of no event which gave my father more pleasure than the engagement of his son to the daughter of his old friend. With perfect confidence in her principles, and a persuasion that she would make my brother happy, he was pleased with her being, like my mother, a Norfolk woman, and interested himself much in procuring for them an house at Hampstead that they might be established near him." Bot the husband and the wife were baptised into the Church of England in 1812.

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