ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

     In 1781, an anonymous translation of Diderot’s stage-play Le Père de Famille appeared in England. It is entitled "The Family Picture" and the translator is named on the title page as simply "A Lady". The list of subscribers included a lot of people of high rank, many of whom lived in Wiltshire or the Isle of Wight. It also included a lot of minor members of the Craven family. These include a "Mrs Craven", possibly Mrs Mary Craven, the mother of Lord Craven, "Mrs Liddiard of Bath" - the married name of Jane, sister of Lord Craven - and "Mr William Hicks and Mr John Hicks of Gloucester", cousins of Mrs Craven, whose maiden name was Hicks,      These two clues lead me to wonder whether the Diderot play was translated by Miss Henrietta Colebrooke who is named in 1788 on the title page of  Thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Selected from His Writings... and Translated by Miss Henrietta Colebrooke (2 volumes, London, 1788). The introduc...

  Like many other great English families, in the late nineteenth century the Cravens were strapped for cash. Running numerous stately homes and mixing in London society had become ruinously expensive, particularly after the ambitious building projects of the third Earl. So the fourth Earl decided to follow the trend and in 1893 he married an American heiress, which was the obvious solution. Cornelia Martin, 1877-1961.     The Martins, an  immensely wealthy family of New York bankers, bought an an estate in Scotland where in the early 1890s they met William George Robert Craven, the fourth Earl, and introduced him to their daughter Cornelia. With no discouragement from her parents, he  proposed to Cornelia and married her in 1893 when he was twenty-four, and she was only sixteen.       Cornelia entered London society, where other American heiresses such as Lady Randolph Churchill and the Duchess of Marlborough, took a leading rôle. With he...