Newsletter of the Elizabeth Craven Society 2020
There have been several noteworthy events in the past year or so. The Eighteenth Century Poetry website has now got an updated and far more comprehensive entry on Elizabeth Craven. It used to list only one poem, and that was spurious! It has now got a far more accurate and comprehensive list together with an updated bibliography.
https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00215.shtml
There have been several recent books that discuss Elizabeth Craven, all of them concentrating on her travel writing which is what she is principally known for. The most interesting of these is Greek Dystopia in British Women Travellers’ Discourse, by Dimitrios Kassis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018) which does at least give Craven credit for undertaking a difficult and perilous voyage around the Greek islands in the 1780s. The book "sheds light on British women travellers' efforts to subvert patriarchal authority and engage in predominantly male activities". He notes that Craven treats the Greeks as part of the pan-European culture - a key part - and sympathizes with them. However, he carelessly reproduces opinions from earlier books without checking them. One of these is Jane Robinson's Wayward Women, A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford University Press, 1991) which included casual references to Craven along with 350 other writers. Robinson referred to Craven's "excruciating verse" presumably without reading any of it, and Kassis unfortunately reproduces her opinion without investigating the matter. So much of academic study is done with a Xerox machine!
Like many other critics, Kassis is cross with Craven for not getting into the pool at the Turkish bath that she visited in Athens. He suggests all kinds of extraordinary and complicated reasons for her not doing so, calling her "an imperial beholder". In fact it would have been risky to get into an unfiltered, unchlorinated pool with any number of total strangers, who might have had any number of contagious diseases. The reason Craven lived to be 78 and enjoyed such good health was that she followed very good health guidelines.
This Turkish bath visit is one of the best known passages in Craven's book and gets berated again by Katrina O'Loughlin in Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Chapter Two (p 65-94) offers a reading of Craven that is error-strewn and hostile. It is very comparable to the published essays by Katherine Turner, Elisabetta Marino etc. The purpose of Craven's travelogue is held to be "formulations of elite identity" the elite identity being that of "ancien régime status". But Craven never had any "ancien régime status" as she was English not French and the systems of government in the two countries were entirely different. Monarchical rule had been abolished in England in 1688. Craven's sympathy for Cassius, a young boy travelling alone, is presented by O'Loughlin as an egotistical display of sensibility, not as a genuine womanly sympathy for a child who needs maternal concern. The incident actually happened at a post near Blois, not Marseilles, and the French phrase "plein air" means open air, not "plain air". Basically, O'Loughlin has selected or twisted bits of the travelogue to fit a stereotype of the ultra-conservative, an arch-baddie who is disapproved of in academic circles. Craven is accused of "contempt" because she and her friends decline to drive their carriage round and round a courtyard. If she allows herself to be looked at, or cannot avoid it, she is blamed for being vain, yet if she avoids being looked at she is accused of a "unilateral mode of spectatorship". O'Loughlin claims that in Venice, Craven compares herself to one of the grand sights of the piazza San Marco. That is not true: Craven actually writes that the Venetians have a great curiosity for staring at foreign visitors, which is somewhat different from the admiration foreign visitors have for the architecture or paintings they come to see.
O'Loughlin also claims that in Athens, Craven never actually visited the Turkish bath itself, only an ante-room. This is inaccurate, as the text plainly describes the pool, "which last was circular, with niches in it for the bathers to sit in; it was a very fine room with a stone dome— and the light came through small windows at the top". Although she did not enter the water, she certainly saw everything, and I don't understand how her dislike of fat bodies can be a "prejudice of class". There are errors even in the chapter's transcription of quotations and there is nothing new to be learned from this.
https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00215.shtml
Gale publications has brought out a new printed edition of Craven's story Modern Anecdote of the Ancient Family of the
Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns, originally published in 1780. This is well deserved.
Ecco, Print Editions (April 20, 2018) ISBN-10: 1379900565 ISBN-13: 978-1379900566
I have published my biography of Craven's close friend, the artist and novelist Sophie de Tott, who spent some years living with her at Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith, Sophie de Tott, Artist in a Time of Revolution. This has bearings on Elizabeth Craven's life and that of her son Keppel.
There have been several recent books that discuss Elizabeth Craven, all of them concentrating on her travel writing which is what she is principally known for. The most interesting of these is Greek Dystopia in British Women Travellers’ Discourse, by Dimitrios Kassis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018) which does at least give Craven credit for undertaking a difficult and perilous voyage around the Greek islands in the 1780s. The book "sheds light on British women travellers' efforts to subvert patriarchal authority and engage in predominantly male activities". He notes that Craven treats the Greeks as part of the pan-European culture - a key part - and sympathizes with them. However, he carelessly reproduces opinions from earlier books without checking them. One of these is Jane Robinson's Wayward Women, A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford University Press, 1991) which included casual references to Craven along with 350 other writers. Robinson referred to Craven's "excruciating verse" presumably without reading any of it, and Kassis unfortunately reproduces her opinion without investigating the matter. So much of academic study is done with a Xerox machine!
Like many other critics, Kassis is cross with Craven for not getting into the pool at the Turkish bath that she visited in Athens. He suggests all kinds of extraordinary and complicated reasons for her not doing so, calling her "an imperial beholder". In fact it would have been risky to get into an unfiltered, unchlorinated pool with any number of total strangers, who might have had any number of contagious diseases. The reason Craven lived to be 78 and enjoyed such good health was that she followed very good health guidelines.
The exterior of the Turkish Bathhouse at Athens today.
This Turkish bath visit is one of the best known passages in Craven's book and gets berated again by Katrina O'Loughlin in Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Chapter Two (p 65-94) offers a reading of Craven that is error-strewn and hostile. It is very comparable to the published essays by Katherine Turner, Elisabetta Marino etc. The purpose of Craven's travelogue is held to be "formulations of elite identity" the elite identity being that of "ancien régime status". But Craven never had any "ancien régime status" as she was English not French and the systems of government in the two countries were entirely different. Monarchical rule had been abolished in England in 1688. Craven's sympathy for Cassius, a young boy travelling alone, is presented by O'Loughlin as an egotistical display of sensibility, not as a genuine womanly sympathy for a child who needs maternal concern. The incident actually happened at a post near Blois, not Marseilles, and the French phrase "plein air" means open air, not "plain air". Basically, O'Loughlin has selected or twisted bits of the travelogue to fit a stereotype of the ultra-conservative, an arch-baddie who is disapproved of in academic circles. Craven is accused of "contempt" because she and her friends decline to drive their carriage round and round a courtyard. If she allows herself to be looked at, or cannot avoid it, she is blamed for being vain, yet if she avoids being looked at she is accused of a "unilateral mode of spectatorship". O'Loughlin claims that in Venice, Craven compares herself to one of the grand sights of the piazza San Marco. That is not true: Craven actually writes that the Venetians have a great curiosity for staring at foreign visitors, which is somewhat different from the admiration foreign visitors have for the architecture or paintings they come to see.
O'Loughlin also claims that in Athens, Craven never actually visited the Turkish bath itself, only an ante-room. This is inaccurate, as the text plainly describes the pool, "which last was circular, with niches in it for the bathers to sit in; it was a very fine room with a stone dome— and the light came through small windows at the top". Although she did not enter the water, she certainly saw everything, and I don't understand how her dislike of fat bodies can be a "prejudice of class". There are errors even in the chapter's transcription of quotations and there is nothing new to be learned from this.
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres "Le Bain Turc".
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