Frances Seymour Countess of Hertford

-
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, 2013.
112
  • BirthName: Frances Thynne
  • Nicknames: Fanny; Renée
    She used this name in correspondence with her friend Lady Luxborough .
    Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1940.
    121

  • Self-constructed: Cleora
  • Married: Seymour
  • Pseudonym: Eusebia
    She took this name from a work by Joshua Sylvester .
    Stecher, Henry F. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the Poetess of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism. Herbert Lang, 1973.
    31

  • Titled: Countess of Hertford; Duchess of Somerset
    Though she was briefly Duchess of Somerset at the end of her life, it was as Lady Hertford that she was known during most of her years of writing and patronage.
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford's two anti-slavery poems "The Story of Inkle and Yarico" and "An Epistle from Yarico to Inkle, after he had sold her for a Slave", published in 1725, had a long afterlife on the page and in the theatre. The operatic version dates from 1787. This print, which illustrated an undated edition in Dutch, shows Inkle, arrived in Jamaica, selling his pregnant native American lover and rescuer.

Milestones

10 May 1699

Frances Thynne (later Countess of Hertford) was born, the elder of two daughters, most probably at her paternal grandfather's estate, Longleat in Wiltshire.
Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1940.
4 and n2
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1725

Two poems by Frances, Countess of Hertford , about Yarico, a native American woman brutally betrayed by her white English lover Thomas Inkle, appeared anonymously in A New Miscellany: Being a Collection of Pieces of Poetry.
Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1940.
419
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

May 1738

Frances, Countess of Hertford 's The Story of Inkle and Yarrico was handsomely published, with its companion piece, as Attempted in Ver[s]es by The Right Hon. the Countess of ****.
Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press, 1975, 2 vols.
S380
Hertford, Frances Seymour, Countess of. The Story of Inkle and Yarrico. J. Cooper, 1738.
title-page

1742

An unperformed tragedy, Inkle and Yarico by the obscure Mrs Weddell (apparently based on Frances, Lady Hertford 's poem of this title), was published in London.
Scholar Vincent Carretta thinks that Mrs Weddell may be pseudonymous. Two anonymous works assigned to her are The City Farce: Designed for the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, prefaced with a spirited Address to the Pit (second edition 1737), and a satirical prose account of a pleasure trip, A Voyage up the Thames, 1738. Her Inkle and Yarico tragedy is included in volume 5 of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, edited by Jeffrey Cox , 1999.
Feminist Companion Archive.
Carretta, Vincent. “Review”. Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol.
34
, No. 1, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 2000, pp. 121-6.
125

7 July 1754

Frances Seymour (formerly Countess of Hertford , now dowager Duchess of Somerset) died.
Cokayne, George Edward. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant. Editor Gibbs, Vicary, St Catherine Press, 1910–1959, 14 vols.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

10 May 1699

Frances Thynne (later Countess of Hertford) was born, the elder of two daughters, most probably at her paternal grandfather's estate, Longleat in Wiltshire.
Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1940.
4 and n2
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Please click on login button to check your access and/or enter your credentials. Alternatively if you don’t have access, please click on “Subscribe”.

Log inSubscribe