Elizabeth Craven, Coombe Abbey and the Gothic Tradition


Soon after Elizabeth Berkeley married William Craven in 1767 he inherited the title of Lord Craven and this ancestral home, Coombe Abbey, near Coventry in Warwickshire. 



This tinted drawing taken from the South side was published in 1810, by which time Elizabeth Craven's son had inherited Coombe Abbey. The house stood in a beautiful deer park, part of which still exists.




This much earlier drawing done by Daniel King in 1656 shows the structure and layout of the building very clearly. Coombe Abbey was, like so many English aristocratic country houses, constructed out of the ruins of a pre-Reformation monastery. The Gothic cloister of the original monastery is still clearly visible in the central quadrangle of the building. The pointed arches of the windows and regular pattern of vaulting from an original covered walkway resemble what you would see in a convent in Italy or in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges today.
    The Tudor additions make the building more substantial. You can see that an extra storey has been added in the middle at the top, creating a third floor with gables, a small turret and high chimneys. And on the right of the picture, a fragment in silhouette of a broken archway reveals a ruined section of the older building.


 
This drawing, done in Victorian times, shows the interior of the building which remained essentially Tudor until the time of Elizabeth Craven. It still had the vast mullioned windows, the huge fireplaces, the solid carved oak panelling and the ornate plaster ceilings in geometric designs. It was grand and gloomy rather than comfortable! When Elizabeth Craven stayed there she invited neighbours from far and wide to take part in entertainments, musical and theatrical, to cheer the place up.
       Coombe Abbey was greatly altered in later periods and is now a hotel where you can stay in  far greater comfort than its Georgian inhabitants ever imagined.

        Gothic buildings such as Coombe Abbey became very popular in fiction in the late Georgian period. The fashion was led by Horace Walpole in his novel The Castle of Otranto. He was followed by the immensely successful Anne Radcliffe, whose enjoyably spooky Mysteries of Udolpho was satirized by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. 
       Horace Walpole went so far as to build his own mock-Gothic house in late Georgian times, called Strawberry Hill. It became celebrated. 


One of Elizabeth's close friends wrote a novel in this Gothic tradition in which Coombe Abbey and Elizabeth herself are featured in thin disguise. But who was the author and what is the title of the book? What name did it give to Coombe Abbey and what other real people from Georgian society are depicted in it?

If you would like to find out the answers to these questions, and read more about Elizabeth Craven and her extraordinary life, read

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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