Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland

The Duchess of Portland , friend of EM and the Bluestockings, and patron of art and literature, died.

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...

The letters of EM 's youth—to the Duchess of Portland and to her sister Sarah Scott —are sparkling, irreverent, and inventive. Some of these were conveyed via Elizabeth Elstob . Her early claim about the...

Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke in Bristol the previous September...

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...

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...