ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Why is there a square named Anspach Place in Southampton? It is named after Anspach House, a now-vanished building once occupied by Elizabeth Craven and her second husband, the Margrave of Anspach. She and the Margrave leased a house there on the West Quay from 1801 until 1812 to use as a holiday home. She loved sailing and kept a boat in Southampton harbour, in which she sailed across the Channel on at least one occasion. Southampton attracted many sailing enthusiasts who loved to take their private boats out towards and around the Isle of Wight. Later she also leased the adjacent house, and named the combined residence Anspach House.  It was next door to the mediaeval Westgate, with its stone Gothic arch.  Anspach House 1845 In July 1806, when recently widowed, Craven wrote to her friend Sir Isaac Heard from Southampton, "I visit this Place as the Prettiest and quietest for Sea-Bathing I know." [1]  In the summer of 1809, Craven spent some weeks there with he...

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Jane Austen and the Brontës  by Devoney Looser. I wonder whether the blurb on this book was written by the publishers (Bloomsbury), or by the author. Nowadays publishers usually ask the author to write it. It claims:-" Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters -- exact contemporaries of Jane Austen -- were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published 26 books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the ...

Chawton cottage.    I'm sure many people are, like me, enjoying watching the TV dramatisation of Gill Hornby's novel "Miss Austen", which centres on Jane Austen's elder sister, Cassandra.    I have not, alas, read the book. I intend to do so but for now will be content to enjoy Keeley Hawes' performance as Cassandra in later life, and the very atmospheric recreation of the Regency world. The casting of Jane Austen herself is certainly rather surprising, not at all like the classical beauty we are used to seeing on the £10 banknote. Patsy Curran has an expressive and distinctly comical face, far darker than most portrayals of the authoress.    If you know anything about Jane Austen you will be familiar with the story of how her elder sister's fiancé died before they could be married, leaving her to remain "Miss Austen" for life. After Jane's death Cassandra destroyed an unknown number of her sister's letters, cutting out passages from the ...

  In May 1820, only three years after Jane Austen died, an article appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register , a periodical edited by Thomas Campbell, ‎Samuel Carter Hall, and ‎Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton  ‎(author of The Last Days of Pompeii ). It was an extended appreciation and evaluation of the women writers of the time, and was entitled "On the Female Literature of the present age; No. 2. The Author of Glenarvon; the Miss Porters; Mrs. Inchbald; Madame Arblay; Miss Burney; Lady Morgan; Miss Austen; Mrs. Jackson; Miss Taylor; ..."     The critic gives high praise to many of Jane Austen's contemporaries. When he (assuming it is one if the three editors who is writing) comes to Jane Austen, he laments her early death, and praises her in terms that may surprise modern readers.  " ... We turn from the dazzling brilliancy of Lady Morgan's works to  repose on the soft green of Miss Austen's sweet and unambitious creations . Her " Sense ...

The Lost Books of Jane Austen is the title of a book by an American, Janine Barchas. How exciting it sounds! What are these lost books of Jane Austen, and is she about to unveil some undiscovered, unpublished manuscripts to the world? A couple of years ago a book that is possibly an unknown early work by Austen was reprinted: Two Girls of Eighteen, edited by P.J. Allen.    Sadly, there are no such revelations in Barchas's book. The title merely refers to the many different editions of Austen's novels which have appeared over the two centuries since she wrote them, and which Barchas apparently collects.    This is an amusing hobby if you have got the space, and Barchas reproduces countless cover designs and title pages in different styles, typefaces and formats, with or without illustrations, according to shifting tastes, and the sort of readership the edition was aimed at. Some are meant to impress, others to lure the reader with promises of excitement or gooey rom...

     In his book  Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?: Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction , Professor John Sutherland raised the question of how the rumour of Elizabeth Bennet's imminent engagement to Mr Darcy could have reached the ears of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, prompting her to make her bossy and interfering call on Elizabeth at Longbourn in volume 3 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice .      I love this sort of criticism, which used to be referred to as the "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" school. Now desperately unfashionable, it treats characters in novels as real people who exist beyond the parameters of the written narrative and can thus be followed and investigated outside the boundaries of the text. It makes an interesting game, and it is certainly far less absurd than many of the currently fashionable schools of criticism. Professor Sutherland is right, that if we cannot provide any reasonable explanation of how and why this rumour travell...

  Maria Johnstone was the niece of William, 6th Baron Craven, Elizabeth Craven's husband, so she was the writer's niece by marriage. Several watercolour paintings by her of Coombe Abbey and its surroundings are preserved in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry.  They give a vivid picture of the house as it was in 1797, before the ambitious alterations of later generations. Seen at this distance and from this angle, it merges into one harmonious whole, with the Georgian wings on the left and the Tudor  and Stuart buildings visible on the right, unified by being in stone of the same colour. A few sheep graze peacefully in the foreground.  Coombe Abbey was by this time owned by Elizabeth Craven's son, the next Lord Craven, who was too busy on active service during the war to spend much time there.  Maria Johnstone was aged twenty when she did these paintings. Her father, the Rev. Robert Augustus Johnstone, had married Anna Rebecca Craven in 1773, and M...

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 S...