Elizabeth Craven and her Oriental Plays

One of the prevalent fashions in literature in Elizabeth Craven's time was for the exotic. Along with the Gothic, it enjoyed a distinct vogue in the late Georgian period. People loved to read tales set in Turkey, Persia or Arabia, and Elizabeth Craven knew some of the most successful authors in this field. William Beckford, author of Vathek, was one of her friends  - a very close friend indeed - and so was Anne-Marie Fauque de Vaucluse, a Frenchwoman who settled in England and wrote novels with titles such as Tales from the Seraglio and The Vizirs, or The Enchanted Labyrinth.

      A Tchoadar    

Unlike these writers, however, Elizabeth did actually visit the near East. She was a bold and adventurous traveller who saw far more of Europe and neighbouring countries than most other women of her time could expect to do, even if they were the wives of diplomats or merchants.

 She went as far afield as Russia, Turkey and Romania, and drew on what she saw to make her plays and stories always full of variety. In one play, Abdoul, a comedy with a Turkish setting, she introduces the comical character of a Tchoadar, a sort of official escort provided for foreigners. She herself had once been compelled to accept one of these while in Turkey, and she did not relish being chaperoned!

Craven seems to have written this play, like some others, in French, and it was performed in Germany at the court of Anspach. A French play about Turkey, performed in Germany, gives you some idea what a cosmopolitan character Elizabeth Craven was. One of her later plays was called The Smyrna Twins, and her last great success, The Princess of Georgia, also had an exotic setting. By Georgia, she meant the region of the Caucasus, not the southern state of the USA.

But there may have been another reason why she decided to set her story in that precise region. To find out the explanation and discover more about Elizabeth Craven, her works and her travels, see

Vernon Press - Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European ...

https://vernonpress.com/title?id=334

23 Jun 2017 - Elizabeth Craven's fascinating life was full of travel, love-affairs and scandals but this biography, the first to appear for a century, is the only one ...

























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