Newsletter of the Elizabeth Craven Society 2024

 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 Even more exciting there is a handwritten volume of her early poems, which contains unpublished poems, serious and comical, and a long, reflective preface in which she explains her early Romantic theory of poetry.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.

   All efforts to avert the proposed plans for 16, Charles Street, the former Mayfair home of the Craven family, failed and the plan to turn it into a very large scale up-market restaurant was accepted, and is going ahead. We hope that the interior is not badly damaged.

Publications.

Elizabeth Craven is given a chapter in Artists, Writers, and Diplomats’ Wives: Impressions of Women Travelers in Imperial Russia, an anthology edited by Evelyn M. Cherpak (Rowman and Littlefield 2023). The book looks very worthwhile and uses up-to-date scholarship.

Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works by Brenda Ayres (Taylor and Francis 2024) mentions Craven as one of a significant body of women travel-writers in the late 18th century who provided precedents for Mary Wollstonecraft when she wrote her Letters from Sweden (1796).

Craven is also mentioned in History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East: From Orientalism to the Arab Spring (Lisa Pollard, ‎Mona L. Russell, Taylor and Francis 2023). The word "Gender" in the title should be enough to warn you off this book, which alleges among other things that by the 19th century, European "travel writers had succeeded in creating harem inmates in need of rescue". The authors seem to think that the inmates of harems (many of whom were of course foreign captives abducted or purchased as slaves) were volunteering for lifetime imprisonment. It is an axiom of "woke" history that the Ottoman Empire was a jolly good thing that did no end of good, while the colonialism of Europeans was simply terrible in every way. Beware!

    Dr William Lempriere, a surgeon who attended the women in the harem of the Sultan of Morocco in the 1780s, described their miserable life, confined in rooms without windows, and so bored that they would pretend to be ill or have toothache just to be allowed a visit from a surgeon - the only outsider they were permitted to see. Some asked him for poison to do away with themselves or to kill a rival for the Sultan's affection. One inmate, Marthe Francheschini, born Catholic, told him she had been forcibly converted to Islam only under threat of having all her hair pulled out by the roots. (‘A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Sallee, Mogadore, Santa Cruz, Tarudant, and thence over Mount Atlas to Morocco,’ London, 1791.) There is a book about Helen Gloag, a Scottish woman who was captured and taken to a Muslim harem in the same period. It is not that these women did not want to be rescued, but that European powers wanted to keep on the right side of Southern potentates.

Christian monks in Tunis and various ports of the Levant ran charitable rescue missions that used funds from donors in Catholic countries to buy back some of the slaves of both sexes who found themselves prisoners of the Ottoman rulers and their client states. These missions operated for centuries.

There has been a new edition of the old Broadley and Melville book The Beautiful Lady Craven which is an edition of her Memoirs with a lengthy but very outdated preface.
(Author Elizabeth Craven (Baroness) Publisher Creative Media Partners, LLC, 2023ISBN 1022414143, 9781022414143Length 358 pages, 2 Volumes).