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...

The writer Elizabeth Craven had seven children while she was married to her first husband, William, Lord Craven. This group portrait shows six of them, and is dated 1777. They are standing in front of an archway of classical design, through which a landscaped park can be seen. It may be that of Benham Place, in Berkshire, where Capability Brown had just landscaped the park for Lord Craven. The painting was in the Craven family collection until sold by Sotheby's in 2013 for only £25,000, which sounds like a bargain to me. Four of the children are standing, one is sitting on a woman's lap and the youngest of all is a baby in the arms of another woman, at the back of the picture.      But which child is which? And who are the women holding the youngest ones? Certainly neither is Elizabeth Craven.     One identification is easy.  The boy in the greenish-blue jacket and yellow waistcoat, with a dog at his side, is Elizabeth Craven's eldest son, William, who l...

Elizabeth Craven was painted many times. This portrait of her by Ozias Humphry (1742-1810) is one of the most fascinating images as it captures a certain shrewdness and humorous twinkle in the eye.  Ozias Humphrey, self-portrait. The date of the painting was until recently uncertain, but it has now been established from correspondence in a private collection that it was done in 1782, just before Craven left England for France. Her husband never paid for it, and the bill was finally settled several years later by her brother the Earl of Berkeley.     Ozias Humphry was a tremendously talented artist whose career was blighted by an accident that damaged his eyesight, and by 1797 he became completely blind. He did not spend his entire working life in England; he was in Italy from 1773 until 1777, and left for India in 1785.   When we look at the high-built-up hairstyle, with a silken scarf wound into it, and the light muslin shawl draped around the ...

Jane Austen and Elizabeth Craven were contemporaries but it is not known whether they ever met. It remains an intriguing possibility as they had many acquaintances in common, and were often only one link apart in the social network of late Georgian England.  There are many literary connections between them. Jane Austen certainly read some of Craven's books and was influenced by them. She was probably also aware of Craven by reputation... and the reputation was rather a racy one.  Lady Susan is the title of one of Jane Austen's most accomplished pieces of juvenilia, a relatively short epistolary novel with a sophisticated, far-from-saintly anti-heroine, Lady Susan Vernon, who, in her private letters to her best friend, boasts of her skills in flirting, adultery and general scheming. It is thought that Austen later put some of these traits into the character of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park and that her sister-in-law, Eliza de Feuillide, may have served as a mod...

Soon after Elizabeth Berkeley married William Craven in 1767 he inherited the title of Lord Craven and this ancestral home, Coombe Abbey, near Coventry in Warwickshire.  This tinted drawing taken from the South side was published in 1810, by which time Elizabeth Craven's son had inherited Coombe Abbey. The house stood in a beautiful deer park, part of which still exists. This much earlier drawing done by Daniel King in 1656 shows the structure and layout of the building very clearly. Coombe Abbey was, like so many English aristocratic country houses, constructed out of the ruins of a pre-Reformation monastery. The Gothic cloister of the original monastery is still clearly visible in the central quadrangle of the building. The pointed arches of the windows and regular pattern of vaulting from an original covered walkway resemble what you would see in a convent in Italy or in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges today.     The Tudor additions make the buil...

Elizabeth Craven wrote in many different genres - stories, plays, poetry and travelogues flowed from her pen. In this humorous tale originally published in 1779,  Modern Anecdote of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdar-sprakengotchderns,  she uses a ridiculously long German name to poke fun at ancient noble families with immensely long pedigrees, just like her own.  The tale was very popular and went into many editions. It was d edicated to the "Honorable Horace Walpole, Esq". Walpole was a wit, an MP and a letter writer who paid Elizabeth Craven many compliments.                Portrait of Horace Walpole by Rosalba Carriera This story by Elizabeth Craven had a marked  influence on her contemporary Jane Austen. Can you guess which of Jane Austen's six novels I am taking about? If you would like to know more about Elizabeth Craven's long friendship with Horace Walpole, read  Elizabeth Craven: ...