ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Anyone interested in our history and heritage must be alarmed at the recent leak of an internal document suggesting that the National Trust may be contemplating a drastic change of policy.                                          Kingston Lacy House, a National Trust Property in Dorset. The Times reports that the NT is set to sack a whole top tier of art specialists, hold fewer exhibitions and keep only twenty of its five hundred historic houses continually open to the public. They are also planning to sack their education officers and discontinue affordable visits to their properties for schoolchildren.  If that is true it sounds like a complete betrayal of the mission of the NT. Families gave or sold their properties to the NT on the understanding that they would be available for enjoyment by the whole public, in perpetuity. A paper written by NT director Tony Berry, full of slick jargon that makes one shudder, proposes an “urgent review" of opening hours and the development of

Jane Austen's brother Edward owned the large estate of Chawton in Hampshire including this Tudor manor house which Jane called the Great House. He was fortunate enough to have been adopted by its previous owners, the Knight family. Something rather similar happens to Frank Churchill in Emma . The Knights were  distant relatives of the Austens, and had no child or heir of their own. They could have adopted any one of the Austen children, but they were only interested in a boy. It was an early lesson for Jane about how girls were less valued. When he grew up, Edward rarely lived at Chawton House as he acquired an even grander mansion, Godmersham Park in Kent, which became his by marriage.  When he was at Chawton, and his mother and sisters were installed in the cottage, they were frequently invited to visit him at the Great House. It was only a short walk from their home along a country lane and then up the drive.  Tall trees create a splendid avenue (just like the one at Sotherton C

When Elizabeth Craven travelled from London down to Southampton to visit the Isle of Wight, which she loved, she must have passed through Alton in Hampshire, and may even have driven right past the house, Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen was living from 1809 until 1817. There was a family connection between them as Jane's sister Cassandra had been engaged to Elizabeth Craven's son's chaplain, who died tragically on a military expedition to the West Indies. And with the Austens was living Martha Lloyd, who was related to the Craven family. Her mother had been born a Craven. This red brick house on a corner in the village of Chawton was the property of Austen's wealthy brother Edward who also owned the local manor house. He provided a former bailiff's cottage on the estate for his widowed mother and two sisters, and it was here that Jane lived for the last eight years of her life, while she wrote most of her best novels. Nowadays the house is preserved as a tribute

A very kind review of "Sophie de Tott" by Julia Sara Porter on Bookworm Reviews. Julia Gasper's previous book, Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European covered the life of Elizabeth Baroness Craven, Princess Berkeley Magravine of Brandenburg-Anspach. She was a brilliant woman  whose travels and writings challenged the roles expected of women. She  deserves to be recognized with other early feminists like Mary  Wollstonecraft who led the path for other women to put those concerns  from writing into activism. Gasper's latest book, Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution, is a biography about another woman with immense talent who was   neglected by history. This woman was Sophie de Tott (1758-1848) and  like Craven, she too lived a colorful life as a portrait painter, novelist, musician, and secret agent. This book reveals her as a strong-willed woman with great talent, a strong sense of liberty and equality, and a scandalous personal life in which she live