Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
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Standard Name: Hertford, Frances Seymour,,, Countess of
Birth Name: Frances Thynne
Married Name: Frances Seymour
Titled: Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Titled: Frances Seymour, Duchess of Somerset
Nickname: Fanny
Pseudonym: Eusebia
Nickname: Renée
Used Form: Renee
Living an upper-class life in the eighteenth century, Lady Hertford
did not publish; her patronage activity was as important as her writing. But as well as letters, a fragmentary political journal, and commonplace-books, she wrote poems, some of which, circulating in manuscript, drifted into print in her lifetime, while a few achieved some notoriety. She claimed that she wrote for her own pleasure and found it easy to suppress any stirrings of ambition.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press.
The melodramatic sketch Pride and Passion relates how the engagement of Hargrave and Helena is broken after Hargrave reveals the story of his past romance with Abra, a poor Mulatto girl.
Bowles, Caroline. The Widow’s Tale and Other Poems. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown.
She dedicated it to her patron Lady Hertford
. The British Library
copy is 12604 ccc. 7. Harvard University
holds the only known copy of an undated set of subscription proposals, which is headed Any...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Carter
The work she translated was Algarotti
's Italian version of Newton
's Optics. The project of translating back from the Italian popularisation of this famous work was recommended to her by Thomas Birch
....
Friends, Associates
Mary Chandler
MC
seems to have become the real friend of several women of higher rank than herself, some of whom moved from the position of her customers to that of her patrons: they included Lady Hertford
Literary responses
Mary Collyer
The pious Duchess of Somerset
(formerly Lady Hertford, a respected patron and poet) skimmed this novel as it passed from hand to hand in her circle (at the end of its publication year) but assured...
Dedications
Dorothea Du Bois
She dedicated it to Lady Hertford
. A manuscript note on the title-page of the British Library
copy says, containing her own Life and Adventures;
Du Bois, Dorothea. Theodora. Printed for the author by C. Kiernan.
AF
was painted in a miniature by Peter Cross
(now in the National Portrait Gallery
) round about 1690. She left another, later miniature of her by Zincke
in her will to Lady Hertford
...
Friends, Associates
Anne Finch
AF
enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken
. She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones
, to whom...
Textual Features
Anne Finch
Many of the poems in this volume are political (Jacobite) or religious in feeling. To the Right Honourable Frances Countess of Hartford is a playful warning to a very young patron to not degrade support...
Education
Elizabeth Grant
EG
refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Literary responses
Eliza Haywood
The Monthly Review found the heroine of this book more interesting than Betsy Thoughtless (with better character-drawing but a continued deficiency in plot and sentiments. It conceded that the whole was doubtless much superior to...
Friends, Associates
Jane Johnson
Woolsey Johnson was succeeded in his living at Olney by the Evangelically-inclined minor poet Moses Browne
(a protégé of Lady Hertford
). Both Johnsons differed doctrinally from Browne, and were soon at open enmity with...
Publishing
Mary Jones
This volume was dedicated to the Princess of Orange
: Anne, daughter of George II
and the late Queen Caroline
. The princess's mother had been a patron of MJ
's friend Martha Lovelace, later...
Timeline
12 June 1724: Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford reported that...
Building item
12 June 1724
Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford
reported that the English Court had almost universally taken to wearing French fashions.
March 1748: The Poems of Thomas Warton the elder were...
12 February 1765: Thomas Percy published his edited Reliques...
Writing climate item
12 February 1765
Thomas Percy
published his edited Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a rediscovery of poems from the middle ages. He dedicated it to the Duchess of Northumberland
, daughter of the poet and letter-writer Lady Hertford
.
September 1770: It was rumoured that the Duke and Duchess...
The duchess was a letter-writer of note; her mother, as Lady Hertford
, had...
2 September 1788: The theatre at Richmond, Yorkshire, opened...
Building item
2 September 1788
The theatre at Richmond, Yorkshire, opened with George Colman
's Inkle and Yarico.
Texts
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford, and Henrietta Louisa Fermor, Countess of Pomfret. Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret. Richard Phillips, 1805.
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford,. “Inkle and Yarico: An Epistle from Yarico to Inkle”. A New Miscellany: Being a Collection of Pieces of Poetry, T. Warner, 1725.
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford,. The Story of Inkle and Yarrico. J. Cooper, 1738.