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The Social Life of a Georgian Novelist: Elizabeth Hervey and Her Journals

by Dianne Barre
Save 33% Save 33%
Current price ₹2,182.00
Original price ₹3,250.00
Original price ₹3,250.00
Original price ₹3,250.00
(-33%)
₹2,182.00
Current price ₹2,182.00

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Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9781036156350
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Fonthill Media
  • Publisher Imprint: Fonthill Media
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 240
  • Original Price: GBP 25.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 494 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Literary Figures

Stored away and forgotten for 200 years, the private journals of Elizabeth Hervey (1749-1820) vividly describe her life and times. Her teenage years were spent in luxury at Fonthill Splendens, home of her stepfather, Alderman William Beckford. She married a handsome army officer who turned out to be a gambler, and with him fled abroad to escape his creditors. Soon widowed and with two small children, she returned to England, and after a brief affair with a political radical poet, settled in London. Intelligent, independent and well-educated, Herveybecame associated with Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill set and the Bluestockings. Every day she wrote her journal, vividly describing theatre visits, family dramas, servants, friends, society gossip, politics, her visits to country houses and lengthy tours at home and abroad. As a novelist she was first published in 1788, launching a career that, while earning her a living, put strain on her relationship with her half-brother, William Beckford, author of the classic gothic novel Vathek and builder of the infamous Fonthill Abbey. Theirs was a complex relationship, marred by literary rivalry, and after a quarrel in 1798 they never met again.

Over the years Hervey's social network widened to include Lord Byron, Richard and Maria Cosway, the Duchess of Devonshire, Eva Garrick, Lady Hamilton and Sarah Siddons. Yet just as vivid in her journals are her accounts of her household servants, her relationship with her sons, her problems with ill health (and drastic remedies) and her financial ups and downs. As a lively and entertaining window into late Georgian society, there are few sources to rival Elizabeth Hervey's journals.

Barre, Dianne: - Dianne Barre is a garden historian. Her PhD research was on the topic of lost formal gardens in her home county of Staffordshire. She worked with Professor Timothy Mowl on that county in his Historic Gardens of England series. She has published several articles on aspects of historical garden features, especially buildings and has a special interest in seventeenth and eighteenth century landscapes.

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