The Craven Connection: How Elizabeth Craven was related to Isabella St John

 Lady Isabella St John, subject of my new book,  The Life and Novels of Isabella St John: The Regency Revisited, was related in multiple ways to Elizabeth Craven. 

Isabella St John was born Lady Isabella Fitzroy in 1792, and was the fourth daughter of the fourth Duke of Grafton. 

In 1812, her elder brother, Henry, Earl of Euston, married Mary Caroline Berkeley, daughter of Admiral George Berkeley and niece of Elizabeth Craven. Craven wrote about the match at the time to her friend Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, saying, "My brother the Admiral is coming home. His last and 3d daughter is going to be married to Ld Euston, who is a good sort of young man, I am told, which is better than being a Duke's son."*

  We find a drawing of Mary Caroline in Lady Isabella's sketchbook, done a few years later:-

Can we perhaps detect a resemblance to this drawing of her aunt, Elizabeth Craven, that appeared in a book of about 1805? Or is that merely imagination?

    Another of Elizabeth Craven's nieces, Georgiana Berkeley, sister of Mary Caroline, married in 1811 George Francis Seymour, R.N., who was a first cousin of Isabella St. John. He was only a captain when she married him but eventually rose to the rank of Admiral and was knighted. The couple were residents of Hampton Court in the 1840s when Isabella St John lived there.

    There were also connections between the St John family and the Cravens. Elizabeth Craven's daughter Arabella, who has figured on this blog before, married General the Hon. Frederick St John, uncle of Henry Joseph St. John, the husband of the novelist.

   The writings of Craven and St John are vastly different and have little in common except that both have been either ignored or damned by critics. Craven caused scandal wherever she went. Isabella St John's family all refused to attend her wedding.

   To learn more read the forthcoming literary biography.

*Letters of C.P.Sharpe, vol.II p.541