Memoirs of My Life (Penguin Classics)

Edward Gibbon had a complex and unhappy personal life. At Oxford he was converted to the Roman church and was consequently sent by his father to Lausanne to be Calvinized. There he fell in love with Suzanne Curchod (later the wife of Necker and the mother of Madame de Stael). His father disapproved and Gibbon reports the outcome in the now famous words "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son". From this point on he devoted himself to his reading and writing, as well as having a military and parliamentary career in England before returning to Lausanne to finish "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". He finished his days under the roof of his friend the Earl of Sheffield, who first edited these memoirs for publication.