ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Anna Countess Temple, circle of Thomas Hudson. Literary tastes and talents often run in families. Elizabeth Craven had an elder cousin who was also a poet, and whose works were published by Horace Walpole. She was Anna, Lady Temple, née Chambers, and her mother had been Lady Mary Berkeley, a daughter of the 2nd Earl of Berkeley.       Anna was born in 1707, the daughter of Thomas Chambers of Hanworth. She married Richard Grenville, Lord Temple. The Grenville family owned the estate at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, celebrated for its splendid landscape design.     She does not seem to have been known as a Bluestocking or one of the circle of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu. But her friendship with Horace Walpole and his encouragement of her writing indicates that she must have been a cultivated woman.  In 1764  Walpole printed a volume of her poems at Strawberry Hill,  Poems by Anna Chamber Countess Temple,  and this is now available among t...

 Three manuscript letters of Elizabeth Craven came on the market and were sold privately during 2022. They appear to be written from Benham in the period shortly before she left England. They have been cut from an album in which they were mounted. One is addressed to a Mrs Roe and asks her to buy flannel (a warm soft material) in Newbury, the nearest town to Benham, for a garment that will be a gift for a Miss Bentham. The next has no addressee's name and apologizes for not having yet thanked him for the gift of a piano, nor having yet had time to play it, because of the excitement of her son Keppel's long expected return to England. Her "niece Arundell" is also imminently expected, with her husband. It invites the addressee to call on her at any time. The earliest possible date for this second letter is 1811, when Elizabeth Craven's niece Mary Anne Nugent-Temple-Grenville, daughter of her younger sister Mary, married James Everard Arundell, 10th Baron Arundell of...

 It has been an interesting year. We have held a Christmas tea party and an online discussion seminar, both well attended. This portrait of 6th Baron Craven turned up in a London auction room in 2023. The most exciting event has been the discovery of a considerable body of documents relating to Elizabeth Craven in the possession of one of her direct descendants. She has kindly shared them with several friends and there is a lot to be learned from them. They include a lot of letters from, to or about Elizabeth Craven in the period 1785 -1816. There are many letters written by her husband Lord Craven and one from her son Keppel. Even more exciting there is a handwritten volume of her early poems, which contains unpublished poems, serious and comical, and a long, reflective preface in which she explains her early Romantic theory of poetry.     These papers should definitely go into a major national library to be made available to future generations of scholars.   ...