Portrait of Johanna and Adele Schopenhauer (after the original at Stiftung Weimarer Klassik).

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... second oldest description of a cave visit by a woman is that of Johanna Schopenhauer to Peaks Cavern. Johanna, born 1766, was the daughter of a well-to-do German merchant family from Gdansk and obtained a thorough education as a child. She spoke English, Polish, and French and was instructed in natural sciences (SCHOPENHAUER, ca. 1985). In 1787 she and her anglophile husband, the merchant Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, 20 years her senior, travelled to England for the first time. Their plan was to give birth to their child there so that it would automatically obtain English citizenship. However, the parents had second thoughts and travelled back to Gdansk in the winter, where Johanna gave birth to Arthur, who became a famous philosopher. Johanna's second child, Adele, also obtained a certain amount of fame as an artist of shadow portraits. On her second journey to England in 1803/04, Johanna visited Peaks Cavern alone with a tourist group. Like the Grotto of Antiparos, the cave was already a well known tourist attraction. Peaks Cavern near Castelton in Yorkshire was first mentioned in the literature in 1211 (SHAW, 1992). It has an impressive entrance with a river flowing out of it. It is the only cave to which ROSENMüLLER & TILESIUS (1799 and 1805) devoted two chapters. Today the cave is 24 km long, but the part shown to tourists measures only 800 m. Johanna's report of the visit (see also KEMPE et al., 2005) was published in 1814 in her book "erinnerungen von einer reise in den Jahren 1803, 1804 und 1805" (SCHOPENHAUER, 1973). The report is mainly an account of Johanna's personal impressions. Apart from the length of a few cave passages, not much scientific information can be obtained from it. On the other hand the living conditions of the inhabitants in the vast entrance hall were critically commented on. After the death of her husband and a quarrel with Arthur about the inheritance, Johanna moved with Adele to Weimar, the "athens of the north" in 1806, where she established herself as a writer (Fig. 5). Goethe paid her a visit on October 20th, accompanied by his newly-wed wife, Christiane, formerly his "bed treasure" for 18 years. Johanna was the first to meet her unconditionally and became famous in the literature by stating: "i think, that i can give her a cup of tea if goethe gives her his name." Apart from her travel book Johanna wrote short stories and novels ("gabriele") and was a praised novelist of her time (SCHOPENHAUER, 1830/31). She died in 1838 in ...