ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Anna Countess Temple, circle of Thomas Hudson. Literary tastes and talents often run in families. Elizabeth Craven had an elder cousin who was also a poet, and whose works were published by Horace Walpole. She was Anna, Lady Temple, née Chambers, and her mother had been Lady Mary Berkeley, a daughter of the 2nd Earl of Berkeley.       Anna was born in 1707, the daughter of Thomas Chambers of Hanworth. She married Richard Grenville, Lord Temple. The Grenville family owned the estate at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, celebrated for its splendid landscape design.     She does not seem to have been known as a Bluestocking or one of the circle of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu. But her friendship with Horace Walpole and his encouragement of her writing indicates that she must have been a cultivated woman.  In 1764  Walpole printed a volume of her poems at Strawberry Hill,  Poems by Anna Chamber Countess Temple,  and this is now available among the Gale online editions.      Among her works is a poem in

 Three manuscript letters of Elizabeth Craven came on the market and were sold privately during 2022. They appear to be written from Benham in the period shortly before she left England. They have been cut from an album in which they were mounted. One is addressed to a Mrs Roe and asks her to buy flannel (a warm soft material) in Newbury, the nearest town to Benham, for a garment that will be a gift for a Miss Bentham. The next has no addressee's name and apologizes for not having yet thanked him for the gift of a piano, nor having yet had time to play it, because of the excitement of her son Keppel's long expected return to England. Her "niece Arundell" is also imminently expected, with her husband. It invites the addressee to call on her at any time. The earliest possible date for this second letter is 1811, when Elizabeth Craven's niece Mary Anne Nugent-Temple-Grenville, daughter of her younger sister Mary, married James Everard Arundell, 10th Baron Arundell of

 It has been an interesting year. We have held a Christmas tea party and an online discussion seminar, both well attended. This portrait of 6th Baron Craven turned up in a London auction room in 2023. The most exciting event has been the discovery of a considerable body of documents relating to Elizabeth Craven in the possession of her direct descendant, Mrs Ann Elizabeth Lacey-Smith. She has kindly shared them with several friends and there is a lot to be learned from them. They include a lot of letters from, to or about Elizabeth Craven in the period 1785 -1816. There are many letters written by her husband Lord Craven and one from her son Keppel. Even more exciting there is a handwritten volume of her early poems, which contains unpublished poems, serious and comical, and a long, reflective preface in which she explains her early Romantic theory of poetry.     These papers should definitely go into a major national library to be made available to future generations of scholars.    A

 I am grateful to an Internet translation function for translating this review of Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution . TÓTH FERENC Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution. toth.ferenc@abtk.hu ORCID: 0000­0003­2264­466X Julia GASPER. Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution. London: Lulu.com, 2020. 208. [[ For a long time, Sophie de Tott's name was unknown even to those interested in the history of art and literature of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of her paintings  are famous  despite her portraits of people, she is a fine artist  one of the most colorful personalities and witnesses of  her era . Her father, the famous François Baron de Tott (1733– 1793) was a French diplomat of Hungarian origin,  who was employed  in the territory of the Ottoman Empire for a long time . In particular  during  the 1768–1774 Russian–  Turkish war he successfully  defended the Ottoman capital against the threatening Russian  fleet. Later he also wrote memoir

    It is very good news that there is now a digital version of Sophie de Tott's novel Pauline de Vergies, which was first published in Paris in 1799. Since then, there have been no other editions so far as is known.    It has been digitized and placed on their website by the library of the University of Göttingen:- https://gdz.sub.uni- goettingen.de/id/PPN73354990X? tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B7%5D% 2C%22pan%22%3A%7B%22x%22%3A0. 524%2C%22y%22%3A0.745%7D%2C% 22view%22%3A%22info%22%2C% 22zoom%22%3A0.38%7    All three volumes of this rare and undeservedly neglected novel are now available for the general reader. This is an honour this remarkable woman, who was a painter, writer, musician and secret agent, well deserves.    

This stunning painting is currently for sale in a French gallery and is attributed to Sophie de Tott. It is described simply as a "female portrait" and according the sale description is identified as her work by a signature "Sophie C. Tesse de Tott" in the lower right.      Another website describes the painting as a portrait of Sophie herself but this could be a confusion. People are still so unused to female artists that someone may have jumped to the conclusion that the painter's name was that of the sitter. The costume suggests the period c.1800 when Sophie would have been aged about 42, somewhat older than the sitter appears to be. Another portrait by de Tott that is reproduced on the internet is that of Maria, Lady Crauford. This fine imposing painting was displayed at the Royal Academy in London in 1803. It depicts the sitter in the guise of a Sibyl, traditionally portrayed wearing a Turkish style turban and robes.  Maria Teresa Gage (1762-1832), wife of