ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

When Elizabeth Craven travelled from London down to Southampton to visit the Isle of Wight, which she loved, she must have passed through Alton in Hampshire, and may even have driven right past the house, Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen was living from 1809 until 1817. There was a family connection between them as Jane's sister Cassandra had been engaged to Elizabeth Craven's son's chaplain, who died tragically on a military expedition to the West Indies. And with the Austens was living Martha Lloyd, who was related to the Craven family. Her mother had been born a Craven. This red brick house on a corner in the village of Chawton was the property of Austen's wealthy brother Edward who also owned the local manor house. He provided a former bailiff's cottage on the estate for his widowed mother and two sisters, and it was here that Jane lived for the last eight years of her life, while she wrote most of her best novels. Nowadays the house is preserved as a tribute ...

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...

Author Julia Gasper An interview by Jolanta Ryba  from Oxford Prospect This Question and Answer interview with the well-known historian and  Oxford biographer Julia Gasper , about her latest book, a biography of  Elizabeth Craven . 1. How different was this book about Elizabeth Craven from your previous books? Actually, it was very different, because this is the first time I have written about an English person, and the first time I have written about a woman. Both my previous biographies were of men, and foreign subjects – King Theodore of Corsica, and the  Marquis d’Argens . Having said that,  Elizabeth Craven  is still a very Continental Englishwoman, and I still had to use sources in French and write about places in Germany or further afield. 2. What encouraged you to write about her? Well, I came across her when I was doing the research for my last book about the  Marquis  d’Argens. He ...

                         Elizabeth Craven from a drawing published in 1804. Elizabeth Craven is an important feminist writer of the late Georgian period whose works are not easy to access.  Some of the best have never been reprinted. Others were written in French and have never before been translated into English. This new edition with introduction and explanatory  notes, includes a complete translation of one of her best and most entertaining plays, The Modern Philosopher . Title page of the original edition  It also includes Letters to Her Son, a book in which she protested against unfair laws of marriage, and Verses on the Siege of Gibraltar, an example of her satirical writing. The Modern Philosopher and Other Works by Elizabeth Craven, translated and edited by Julia Gasper. Published by Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-modern-philosop...