ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Few people know where and when Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse the writer was buried. When she died she did  not get  any obituaries, but the parish records survive and prove that she was buried on the estate of her friend and patron William Beckford. Beckford was the owner of a grand estate, Fonthill in Wiltshire, where he had a mansion in Palladian style. Nothing survives of it today except these imposing entrance gates.      There were several villages on the estate, one called Fonthill Gifford. There, in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Anne-Marie Fauques was buried in 1804 under her married name of Madame de Starck. Although the house has gone and the original, classical style church was rebuilt in Victorian times, the fine landscaped park of the Beckford estate survives, with its woodlands and lake. It is now owned by the National Trust and most of it is grazed by cattle or sheep. The lake in the grounds of Fonthill, where the author went boating with William...

In 1782 Elizabeth Craven and the brilliant but wayward young writer William Beckford collaborated on a musical entertainment called An Arcadian Pastoral. It was performed in London by a choir of children, with professional musicians taking the solos and providing orchestral accompaniment. No 1 Ouverture Title-page The score was preserved among Beckford's papers, and catalogued by the Bodleian Library under his name, without reference to Elizabeth Craven. In a letter of 1782, Beckford wrote that she had written the words and he had composed the music. When we look closely at the score, it actually says that Elizabeth Craven wrote the music too, for the second of its five Acts. This is not the only example of her writing music, though little of it survives. The items of the Pastoral are numbered, but number 8 is missing. However, it may not be lost entirely. In a letter she enclosed a words of a song about Cupid and Hymen for which she wrote both the words and music, ...