Elizabeth Craven’s fascinating life was full of travel, love-affairs and scandals but this biography, the first to appear for a century, is the only one to focus on her as a writer and draw attention to the full range of her output, which raises her stature as an author considerably. Born into the upper class of Georgian England, she was pushed into marriage at sixteen to Lord Craven and became a celebrated society hostess and beauty, as well as mother to seven children. Though acutely conscious of her relative lack of education, as a woman, she ventured into writing poetry, stories and plays. Incompatibility and infidelities on both sides ended her marriage and she had to move to France where, living in seclusion, she wrote the little-known feminist work Letters to Her Son. In the years that followed, she travelled extensively all over Europe and turned her letters into a travelogue which is one of her best-known works. On her return she went to live in Germany as the companion and eventually second wife of the Margrave of Ansbach. At his court she organised and appeared in theatricals, and wrote several more plays of great interest, including The Modern Philosopher. In 1792 she and the Margrave settled in England, where they were never fully accepted by the more strait-laced pillars of society but mixed with all the musicians and actors and the more rakish of the Regency set. Craven continued to put on her own theatricals and write for the theatre. In her old age, she moved to Naples where she passed her time sailing, gardening and writing her Memoirs. Even in her final years, scandal dogged her, and Craven made her feminist principles and criticisms of the laws of marriage apparent through her involvement in the notorious divorce case of Queen Caroline.

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies, grade: 2,3, University of Constance (Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaften), course: 18th Century Orients: British Women Travellers in the Ottoman Empire, language: English, abstract: Selected letters from Elizabeth Craven’s series of letters which deal with her journey to Constantinople will be analyzed throughout this term paper. The focus of the paper is the outward journey to the Ottoman Empire and the return journey. Special attention is paid to how certain cities or countries in general are being presented by Craven, also focusing on the values of the individual cities and countries. The cities of Vienna and Athens are examined more closely and then Russia, or more precisely Petersburg, will be compared to the cities analyzed before. The research question of this term paper is how the European cities are presented in Elizabeth Craven’s travelogues and to what extent they differ from the representation of Russia. Throughout the analysis, the question of whether there is a collective of the West is also being pursued. After an analysis of the depiction of Vienna and Craven’s experiences there, there will be a comparison with the experiences she made in Athens. The last step of the main part is to compare Vienna and Athens to Petersburg, respectively Russia in general. A final conclusion takes up all the important findings of this work.

The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.