Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland

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...

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...

Elizabeth Robinson (later EM ) became a friend of Lady Margaret Harley (later Duchess of Portland ), who was seven years her senior.

Elizabeth Robinson (later EM ) spent long periods of time with the Duchess of Portland and her husband in London and at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire.

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...

She was a well-known figure in London cultural circles, particularly that of the Bluestockings. Charles Burney called her at-home evenings blue conversazioni's and Horace Walpole called them quite Mazarine-blue. Others specifically mentioned in...

Having abandoned her plan for running a girls' boarding school, EE took up her post as governess to the Duchess of Portland 's very young children.

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

Again, however, the boarding school idea seems never to have got off the ground. EE left Bath after only about a year, to join the household of the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire.

SD reveals her gender in her preface merely by her use of pronouns. Her motive for publishing was a dire need of money. An unnamed benefactor in her family supplied the need, but she decided...

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...

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...