Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Rigby
-
Standard Name: Rigby, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Rigby
Married Name: Elizabeth Eastlake
Titled: Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake
Pseudonym: The Author of Letters from the Baltic
Pseudonym: The Author of Baltic Letters
Used Form: Lady Eastlake
As an art historian, journalist, and public figure, ER
played a major role in shaping modern art criticism. Many of her publications introduced readers and artists to new influences from German art, while others confirmed the importance of the Italian masters. Through her literary and art-history reviews, she influenced Victorian public taste. Produced over a span of sixty years, her work includes travel writing, short stories, essays, and three translations. She was also a talented editor.
Broomfield, Andrea, and Sally Mitchell, editors. Prose by Victorian Women. Garland, 1996.
Lady Eastlake
reported that her friend died at 2 o'clock in the morning and was buried at Llangernyw, near Hafodunos.
Rigby, Elizabeth, editor. Life of John Gibson, R.A., Sculptor. Longmans, Green, 1870.
200
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Friends, Associates
Maria Callcott
In Rome they got to know the painter Charles Eastlake
, and through him other artists, such as John Jackson
and J. W. M. Turner
. MC
's developing interest in the pre-Renaissance art of...
She also knew Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake
, who remembered her as enthusiastic, gentle, and joyous, with a beauty of figure and face peculiarly her own,—as engaging as it was intellectual—with gifts of genius (and...
Literary responses
Louisa Anne Meredith
Though her first colonial book received a warm reception in England, LAM
's sharp criticisms—portraying the lower classes as lazy, men as obsessed with sheep, and women as idle gossips and slaves to fashion—offended some...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
CB
was stung by Elizabeth Rigby
's attack on the second edition in the Quarterly, which entered the debate over governesses by reviewing the novel alongside Thackeray
's Vanity Fair and the Report of...
Literary responses
Mary Martha Sherwood
Elizabeth Rigby
anonymously reviewed the fourth edition for the Quarterly Review in 1843. Rigby found nothing but fault with the book. She saw so much of positive evil in Mrs. Sherwood's writing, and that backed...
Literary responses
Margaret Sandbach
Lady Eastlake
(who was a discriminating critic but also a personal friend of MS
) wrote of her gifts of genius.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Literary responses
Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
Writing for the Quarterly Review, Elizabeth Rigby
asserted that MCHinherits the easy spirit
JWC
became a lawyer, (moving from Ireland to London after the Act of Union) a Tory
MP, an editor of several eighteenth-century texts (including letters by Lady Hervey
and by Henrietta Howard, Lady Suffolk
)...
Textual Production
Margaret Sandbach
Some time in 1851 MS
began writing down John Gibson
's autobiography from his dictation while he was a guest at her home. Their project was cut short when Gibson leftt the house after his...
Textual Production
Anna Brownell Jameson
The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art, written by ABJ
as the fourth volume of her series Sacred and Legendary Art and completed by Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake
, was published posthumously.
Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Scolar Press, 1997.
238
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Timeline
22 March 1832: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar...
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Preface and Memoirs”. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, edited by Charles Eastlake Smith, J. Murray, 1895, p. Various pages.
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Reminiscences of Edinburgh Society Nearly Fifty Years Ago”. Longman’s Magazine, Vol.