ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

There can be no doubt that Jane Austen was influenced in many ways by the writings of Elizabeth Craven, the Georgian feminist writer who was her predecessor. The Austen and Craven families were distantly related, and that, added to Craven's notoriety, would have provided ample reason for Jane Austen to read Craven's books.  This family tree shows how Jane's family were related to the Cravens, Fowles and Lloyds both by marriage and descent.(1) In my book Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European , I have already pointed out the resemblance between a famous scene in Mansfield Park , and a passage in Craven's book Letters to Her Son. On the topic of marriage, Craven writes that women have the same instinctive urge to be free that men have, and whenever she has found herself in a confined garden, with a barrier all around it, her imagination has started to run on ways of crossing the barrier and escaping. I never walked in a shrubbery surrounded...