Elizabeth Rigby

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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.
77-80
Black and white photograph of Elizabeth Rigby, seated, with her hands clasped in her lap. She is wearing a simple light dress with a long, full skirt, and a dark scarf wrapped around her shoulders. She is wearing small dark gloves with white trim at the wrists, and her dark hair is pulled back, with a braid pulled across the top of her head and another braid wrapped at the side of head.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Margaret Sandbach
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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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...
Friends, Associates Sara Coleridge
Among women writers, in addition to Dorothy Wordsworth , Joanna Baillie , and Maria Jane Jewsbury , SC also knew Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Anna Jameson , Elizabeth Rigby , Elizabeth Gaskell , and Harriet Martineau
Friends, Associates Margaret Sandbach
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...
Friends, Associates Anna Swanwick
Other friends mentioned by her niece and biographer were Fredrika Bremer , Anna Brownell Jameson , Frances Power Cobbe , Thomas Carlyle , George MacDonald , Lady Eastlake , Elizabeth Rundle Charles , Lady Martin
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 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 Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
Writing for the Quarterly Review, Elizabeth Rigby asserted that MCHinherits the easy spirit
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Lady Travellers”. Quarterly Review, pp. 98 - 136.
125
of her father's pen, and that her adventures are often most diverting.
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Lady Travellers”. Quarterly Review, pp. 98 - 136.
125
Rigby's review incorrectly gave the title...
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 Margaret Sandbach
Lady Eastlake (who was a discriminating critic but also a personal friend of MS ) wrote of her gifts of genius.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Occupation John Wilson Croker
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 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.
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...

Timeline

22 March 1832
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar in Germany in his early eighties.
Chisholm, Hugh, editor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge University Press, 1911.