ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

   Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, the family home of Elizabeth Craven's ancestors, has been occupied by a succession of Berkeleys since before the Norman Conquest. Rarely however has it been governed by a woman. Anne, Lady Berkeley,  by Meister Drucke  The exception is Anne, Lady Berkeley, who in the reign of Henry VIII held it and controlled the large estates unaided. Not only that, but we are told that she acted as a judge and sat on the Bench. In The Percy Anecdotes we read:- In the reign of Henry VIII. when during some family quarrels, Maurice Berkely, Nicholas Poyntz, and a riotous company of their servants, entered the park of Lady Anne Berkeley, at Yate, killed the deer, and set a hay-rick on fire, this lady repaired to court, and made her complaint. The king immediately granted her a special commission under the great seal to inquire, hear, and determine these riots and misdemeanors, and made her one of the commissioners and of the quorum. She then retu...

Why is there a square named Anspach Place in Southampton? It is named after Anspach House, a now-vanished building once occupied by Elizabeth Craven and her second husband, the Margrave of Anspach. She and the Margrave leased a house there on the West Quay from 1801 until 1812 to use as a holiday home. She loved sailing and kept a boat in Southampton harbour, in which she sailed across the Channel on at least one occasion. Southampton attracted many sailing enthusiasts who loved to take their private boats out towards and around the Isle of Wight. Later she also leased the adjacent house, and named the combined residence Anspach House.  It was next door to the mediaeval Westgate, with its stone Gothic arch.  Anspach House 1845 In July 1806, when recently widowed, Craven wrote to her friend Sir Isaac Heard from Southampton, "I visit this Place as the Prettiest and quietest for Sea-Bathing I know." [1]  In the summer of 1809, Craven spent some weeks there with he...

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Jane Austen and the Brontës  by Devoney Looser. I wonder whether the blurb on this book was written by the publishers (Bloomsbury), or by the author. Nowadays publishers usually ask the author to write it. It claims:-" Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters -- exact contemporaries of Jane Austen -- were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the ...

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...