Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland

As an unusually talented woman moving in fashionable and high-culture circles, the future MD knew almost everybody of interest during her lifetime, including literary celebrities. She was a good friend of the Bluestocking group, and...

The fame of SS 's elder sister, Elizabeth , later eclipsed her own. They enjoyed a very close relationship while they were growing up. Their nickname the two Peas suggests how they were regarded as...

LOM was always especially proud of the fact that the Bentincks were descended, though not actually from the seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish , Duchess of Newcastle (who had no children), at least from the family...

Elizabeth was well-schooled along with her brothers and her sister. Commentators make much of the contribution supposedly provided by their step-grandfather, Cambridge scholar Conyers Middleton ; but in letters to her sister and to the...

EE died in her seventies, after nearly twenty years as a dependent of the Duchess of Portland .

In Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, 2011, Lisa L. Moore classified MD , along with the Duchess of Portland , Anna Seward , and the American Sarah Pierce (1767-1852), as lesbian-like women...