Hester Piozzi's Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany (1789) is an intriguing example of lifewriting and one of the few accounts of the Grand Tour by a woman.1 Its vivid descriptions, humorous anecdotes, wide literary allusions, and colloquial immediacy make it probably her best published work; it has a firmer narrative control, for instance, than her earlier and much better known book, The Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786). As her title suggests, Piozzi's narrative is purposefully divided between observations-renderings of her direct encounters with people and places, on the one hand, and reflectionsmeditations, moral sentiments, and learned commentary, on the other. In both of these rhetorical categories, I will argue, Piozzi appears to be conscious of herself as a woman writing in a male-dominated genre, in general, and as a British spectator of an exotic culture, in particular. Although often remarking on local topography, agricultural conditions, and art and architecture, Piozzi was not temperamentally inclined toward the objective description practiced by Addison, Defoe, Arthur Young, Pennant, and Repton. In Observations, it is usually the subjective state of perceiving or recollecting rather than the objects themselves that is uppermost in the narrative; and yet despite frequent moments of indulgence in the beauty of a scene, in contrast to Gray, Gilpin, and West, Piozzi has a relatively loose aesthetic agenda. Above all, Observations is a deeply personal account. Besides other motives, Piozzi is surely writing to vindicate herself as a loyal British citizen before a public that had found scandalous her marriage, after the death of her first husband, Henry Thrale, to an Italian musician. Among her many friends who condemned her brave decision to marry Gabriel Piozzi in 1784, Johnson, we recall, was especially vehement and wrote a wrathful letter to her that terminated their relationship.2 In contrast to her London circle's provincial nastiness, Piozzi exhibited grace and magnanimity, as if becoming a citizen of the world was worth the price of being ostracized. In November 1784, after remaining in Milan for a while, Piozzi mentions in her diary called Thraliana that she has a portrait of Johnson in her apartment. Her warm reflections on the old and ailing man testify to her enduring bond of friendship: Poor Johnson did not ever mean to use me ill, he only grew