She was the seventh child of Johann Georg Mönckeberg, a lawyer and Lord Mayor of Hamburg.
[2] She married the Dutch art historian André Jolles (1874–1946) on 8 September 1900 and together they had five children (Hendrik (d.1902), Hendrika, Jacoba, Jan, Otto, Ruth).
[4] She then returned to Hamburg and in 1923–4, she published a German translation (entitled Herbst des Mittelalters)[5] of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), (English translation The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996)).
[6] During the war she wrote a series of unsent letters describing life in Hamburg at this time to her children who were living abroad.
[7] These were edited and translated as On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany, 1940–1945 by her daughter Ruth Evans in the 1970s (published 1979, London: Peter Owen, republished in 2007 by Persephone Books).