ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

The exhibition at Chawton House entitled  Mary Robinson: Actress, Mistress, Write r, Radical, brought together an immense amount of material shedding light on this remarkable Georgian woman, who deserves to be known for so much more than just being an actress and the mistress of George IV when he was Prince of Wales.    Mary Darby Robinson wrote several novels, a lot of accomplished poetry, and some fascinating Memoirs, as well as the feminist text A Letter to the Women of England.      Despite her fame and talent, her life was never easy. Tricked into marriage in her teens, she was incarcerated in a debtors' prison, with her infant daughter, because of the debts of her feckless husband. She escaped by publishing fiction and launching on a career on the London stage, where she was much applauded for her beauty and talents. Mary Robinson wearing a chemise-style dress. After achieving success in many rôles, in May 1780 she acted the lead in the first of Eli...

 The names in Jane Austen's novels may appear bland and commonplace, but are always carefully chosen and often contain coded meanings.    In Pride and Prejudice,  Austen gave the heroine a name, Bennet, that is a close twin of her own.  Austen or Austin is a contraction of "Augustine". Austin-friars in the City of London is a street where before the Reformation there was a monastery of the order of St Augustine, one of many in England. The name Bennet is a contraction of "Benedict" another saint who founded a monastic order. Austen surely chose the name because the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is a self-portrait. The Bennet family resemble the Austens in one crucial respect - they cannot pass on the family home to the next generation. Their predicament is due to an entail whereas that of the Austens arose out of the fact that her father was a clergyman whose rectory would pass to the next incumbent.     One of the privileges of the English aristocracy is...

 It has been a busy year. Notably, we are very pleased to have arranged for a substantial collection of manuscripts associated with Elizabeth Craven to be deposited in the archives of Chawton House in Hampshire, the research institute for the study of women's writing in the age of Jane Austen. This is an ideal destination, where they will be available for future scholars.      The collection, which was in the hands of a descendant of Elizabeth Craven, includes a manuscript volume of her early poems, more than a dozen autograph letters, and further letters that passed between her husband, the 6th Baron Craven, and his estate manager concerning their financial affairs. It is of both historic and literary significance.    We have held two online seminars, one about the contents of the MS collection and the other to hear a talk given by Jill Kamp about Keppel Craven and the secrets to be discovered in his diaries. Some of these were of a colourful nature and re...

Chawton cottage.    I'm sure many people are, like me, enjoying watching the TV dramatisation of Gill Hornby's novel "Miss Austen", which centres on Jane Austen's elder sister, Cassandra.    I have not, alas, read the book. I intend to do so but for now will be content to enjoy Keeley Hawes' performance as Cassandra in later life, and the very atmospheric recreation of the Regency world. The casting of Jane Austen herself is certainly rather surprising, not at all like the classical beauty we are used to seeing on the £10 banknote. Patsy Curran has an expressive and distinctly comical face, far darker than most portrayals of the authoress.    If you know anything about Jane Austen you will be familiar with the story of how her elder sister's fiancé died before they could be married, leaving her to remain "Miss Austen" for life. After Jane's death Cassandra destroyed an unknown number of her sister's letters, cutting out passages from the ...

An interesting little document has turned up for sale at a London dealer's.  It is a receipt by an engraver for a payment of £100 for the work of preparing an engraving from Sophie de Tott's painting of the Prince de Condé. The receipt is dated 16th June 1802, soon after the portrait was painted. The purpose was to make reproductions of the painting and sell them widely. The interesting thing is that it seems that De Tott herself had to pay the engraver in advance for doing this. presumably she had a contract that gave her a percentage of the profits, but nevertheless she was having to make a considerable investment in the expectation of doing that. this little slip of paper is now on sale for £280 which in relative terms is worth far less than £100 was in 1802. Sophie-Ernestine de Tott, French émigrée artist.] Signed Autograph order for David Morier to pay Gregorio Francisco de Queiroz for Francisco Bartolozzi’s engraving of her painting of the Prince de Condé. With de Queiroz...

 Lady Isabella St John, subject of my new book,  The Life and Novels of Isabella St John: The Regency Revisited, was related in multiple ways to Elizabeth Craven.  Isabella St John was born Lady Isabella Fitzroy in 1792, and was the fourth daughter of the fourth Duke of Grafton.  In 1812, her elder brother, Henry, Earl of Euston, married Mary Caroline Berkeley, daughter of Admiral George Berkeley and niece of Elizabeth Craven. Craven wrote about the match at the time to her friend Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, saying, "My brother the Admiral is coming home. His last and 3d daughter is going to be married to Ld Euston, who is a good sort of young man, I am told, which is better than being a Duke's son."*   We find a drawing of Mary Caroline in Lady Isabella's sketchbook, done a few years later:- Can we perhaps detect a resemblance to this drawing of her aunt, Elizabeth Craven, that appeared in a book of about 1805? Or is that merely imagination?     Anoth...