title: Elizabeth 6th Baroness Craven's social and gendered position in Georgian society through her memoirs, travel writing, portraits and country house
Creators: name: Lockhart, Susan Helen
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: Previously, scholars have focused on Elizabeth 6th Baroness Craven’s travel writing and
theatrical endeavours rather than on her Memoirs, portraits and country house. The key
contribution of this thesis is its exploration of the varied and complex ways she represented
herself across genres, as well as the ways in which she was represented by others, and how
this changed through her lifetime as she negotiated gender norms according to her intentions
and circumstances. This approach is new and original because it pays attention to Lady
Craven as an understudied figure compared with her contemporaries such as Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Hamilton, the Lennox sisters, Elizabeth Montagu and Hester
Thrale.
Lady Craven’s Memoirs first published in 1826, have generally been overlooked by scholars,
but this study offers new and original research establishing how she negotiates gender norms
through her manipulation of literary genre, moving away from diaries, journals and letters,
innovatively creating her own hybrid genre of women’s life-writing. To achieve this, she
combines autobiography with some features of the female ‘appeal’ memoir, but without
casting herself as the notorious protagonist of the scandalous memoir. She represents herself
as a virtuous dutiful wife and loving mother, while encouraging her readers to sympathize
with her as the blameless victim of gender injustice in her marriage to Lord Craven. She selfconsciously represents herself as a respectable woman conforming to gender norms, to
counter earlier negative representations of her in late eighteenth century press coverage and
individual commentary, with the intention of rehabilitating her reputation for her nineteenth
century readership and for posterity.
My research demonstrates how Lady Craven’s A Journey Through the Crimea to
Constantinople first published in 1789, offers an early example of travel writing in which a
woman represents herself as a serious intellectual and cultural commentator, while at the
same time pioneering a new female aesthetic identified with a particular interest in the lives
and appearance of foreign women. The study offers new and original research establishing
how Lady Craven innovatively appropriates the aesthetic language of the Sublime and
eighteenth-century male-centric erotic literature, to explore her growing intimacy with her
future husband the Margrave of Anspach, to whom these travel journal letters are addressed.
Previously, scholars have overlooked the significance of Lady Craven’s portraits and country
house as indicators of her social and gendered position. This study offers new and original research revealing the full extent to which representations of her in portraiture negotiate
artistic conventions and gender norms. Joshua Reynolds represents her as a virtuous
affectionate mother, while Thomas Beach shows her as a woman defying contemporary
expectations of female modesty and decorum. The portraits of Lady Craven discussed in this
thesis offer various representations of her spanning four decades, from Angelica Kauffman’s
painting of her as a young bride-to-be, to Antonio Canova’s sculptural relief depicting her as
a grieving widow.
This research makes a new and original contribution to the scholarship of the eighteenthcentury country house, establishing the form, function and metaphorical meaning of Benham
Park in the context of Lady Craven’s socio-cultural and gender identity. The study establishes
how Lady Craven negotiated gender norms to successfully fulfil her role as aristocratic
landowner’s wife in and around her country house. In her Memoirs she represents herself as
accomplished hostess and efficient household manager, as advisor to her husband on his
finances and estate management, as female philanthropist setting up a school for orphan girls,
as patron of the all-male local militia and as innovative landscape gardener. Meanwhile, the
research demonstrates how the Classical design of the house reflects Lady Craven’s sense of
superior national and cultural identity, evidenced in her travel writing through her preference
for Classicism, during Britain’s rise to global dominance in the second half of the eighteenth
century.
This exploration of an aristocratic/upper-class woman’s self-representation across genres
offers a more nuanced sense of the way women negotiated gender norms, sometimes
submitting to them, sometimes turning them to their advantage and sometimes challenging
them. Such an approach helps us get away from reductive simplifications about particular
women being either rebels or conformists. As this research demonstrates the reality for any
woman was much more complex and multi-dimensional than that.