ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Portrait of a lady, said to be Lady Theophila Lucy nèe Berkeley, later Nelson.      Lady Theophila Berkeley, born in 1650, was the second daughter of George, 1st Earl of Berkeley. Her father managed to save the family fortunes, reduced to a critical state during the Civil War, by marrying Elizabeth Massingberd, daughter of the Treasurer of the East India Company. Theophila's younger sister was the notorious Lady Arabella Berkeley, who ran away with Lord Grey. While the two sisters were very different in most respects, both became notorious.     Theophila was passionate and strong-willed, one of her passions being for brilliant men. She might be said to resemble her great-great-niece Elizabeth Craven in one respect, in that she was an author, albeit of a very different kind.      In 1668, when she was eighteen, Theophila married the nineteen-year-old Sir Kingsmill Lucy (1649-1678). He had inherited the estate of Faccombe, in Hampshire on the border...

  In May 1820, only three years after Jane Austen died, an article appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register , a periodical edited by Thomas Campbell, ‎Samuel Carter Hall, and ‎Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton  ‎(author of The Last Days of Pompeii ). It was an extended appreciation and evaluation of the women writers of the time, and was entitled "On the Female Literature of the present age; No. 2. The Author of Glenarvon; the Miss Porters; Mrs. Inchbald; Madame Arblay; Miss Burney; Lady Morgan; Miss Austen; Mrs. Jackson; Miss Taylor; ..."     The critic gives high praise to many of Jane Austen's contemporaries. When he (assuming it is one if the three editors who is writing) comes to Jane Austen, he laments her early death, and praises her in terms that may surprise modern readers.  " ... We turn from the dazzling brilliancy of Lady Morgan's works to  repose on the soft green of Miss Austen's sweet and unambitious creations . Her " Sense ...

In Hardy's novel Return of the Native, we find an extended description of the anti-heroine Eustacia Vye that veers between rhapsody and ominous warning.                       CHAPTER VII.                       QUEEN OF NIGHT. EUSTACIA VYE was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a faultless goddess, that is, those which make not quite a faultless woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious interc...

   This beautifully written and superbly atmospheric novel, by Lydie Perreau, tells the curious story behind the Wallace Collection, the art museum in central London. It depicts life in Regency England and 19th-century France with an exquisite eye for detail. The complicated family history begins in 1770 with the birth in London of Maria Emilia Fagnani. The daughter of a former dancer, the Italian Marchesa Fagnani (but not of the Marchese) she was recognised by her natural father, the Duke of Queensbury, who allowed his friend, the MP George Selwyn, to adopt her in all but name. He adored her, cossetted her, educated her and eventually left her his considerable fortune. Brought out in society, she met Francis Seymour-Conway, the brilliant and wayward heir of the rich Marquess of Hertford. Francis married her despite his father's opposition. Her illegitimate birth was a social handicap but over men she always exerted an irresistible charm and fascination. She became in due cour...

    In the ODNB entry for Elizabeth Craven, written by Katherine Turner, we find the assertion that the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu written in the early 18th century,  Letters of Lady M--y W-----y M--------e Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, offer a "favourable" account of Turkey, unlike Craven's later travelogue A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople, published in 1789.    Turner's essay "From Classical to Imperial: Changing Visions of Turkey in the Eighteenth Century" in Stephen H. Clarke, ed,  Travel Writing and Empire  (Zed books, 1999), also states that she offers an "attractive vision of Turkey" and that her letters are "highly favourable". The essay presents Craven's travelogue as the antithesis of Montagu's, and insists that Craven is far more critical.     The opinion that Montagu is favourable towards the Turkish empire is undoubtedly meant to be a favourable judgement in itself, i...