Elizabeth Craven, Izabela Czartoryski and Polish Independence
If you list all the famous people Elizabeth Craven knew in the course of her life, the result is a panorama of the most remarkable and significant figures of her era. Artists, writers, actors, statesmen, diplomats, opera-singers, doctors, lawyers, military men, wits, philosophers, philanthropists, aeronautical pioneers... she seems to have known them all. She even met Napoleon. She was one of the few English people of her time to travel to Poland and she was a friend of the most celebrated Polish woman of that epoch. Portrait of Izabela Czartoryski by Alexander Roslin Izabela Czartoryski was a novelist, art collector, horticulturalist and a revolutionary who mixed with Enlightenment thinkers and dared to challenge the foreign powers that had gobbled up Poland. She and her husband made their home the centre of resistance to Russian rule. The result was that there soon wasn't much left of the home, which was a pity. She paid a high price for her principles and belief...