Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire

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Standard Name: Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish,,, Duchess of
Birth Name: Georgiana Spencer
Styled: Lady Georgiana Spencer
Married Name: Lady Georgiana Cavendish
Titled: Lady Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Nickname: The Rat
An occasional or amateur author during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , wrote in a number of genres: poetry, diaries, travel writings, letters, and possibly two novels. Much of her work remains unpublished and her canon, both in prose and poetry, is far from certain.
Portrait of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, by Thomas Gainsborough, between 1785 and 1787. She stands with her body facing to her left, her face tilted towards the viewer, and her arms crossed, with one hand holding a pink rose. She wears a white gown with a high, ruffled neckline and lace detail around the cuffs, and a large, black, broad-brimmed hat. Her hair is pulled away from her face to flow down her back. Chatsworth.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Lucille Iremonger
Her opening chapter addresses her own experience, with heartfelt reminiscence about the impact of political campaigning on married life. She sets out to combat the view of the candidate's (later the member's) wife either as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Muriel Jaeger
She begins this book with a method not unlike that of Experimental Lives from Cato to George Sand. Her first chapter, Pioneers in Conversion, centres its topic on individuals, relating the sudden transformation...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Henrietta Battier
The Protected Fugitives includes poems written from HB 's early teens up to dates close to publication, ranging from the moving (elegies on her dead daughter and son) to the humorous. She writes (at the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catherine Gore
Historical personages, from the Prince of Wales and his mistress Lady Jersey downwards, do appear in this book. It ends on the death of Charles James Fox , apostrophised as one of the great and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Deverell
In a poem about dancing, MD praises the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland .
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 79-80
She gives one epistle a kind of doggerel title: Advice to a Rev'rend Cleric, Near his grand climacteric, That...
Textual Production Ann Yearsley
During the time she was preparing these poems for publication, Yearsley equipped herself with a new team of patrons: Wilmer Gossip , a Yorkshire landowner with poor health, who was given to spending time at...
Textual Production Jean Plaidy
The first-named is George I 's rejected queen (accused of adultery and imprisoned for life before her husband came to the English throne, while her alleged lover was assassinated). The protagonist of the second novel...
Textual Production Mary Robinson
She chose Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire as patron, and sent her, with a mixture of timidity and hope . . . a neatly bound volume of my Poems.
Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Editor Levy, Moses Joseph, Peter Owen.
80
The duchess responded with sensibility, and...
Textual Features Christian Isobel Johnstone
CIJ describes traditional Highland women's occupations such as waulking, or the manufacture of flax cloth. Throughout the novel she introduces, explains, and footnotes Gaelic customs (as Dorothea Primrose Campbell does Zetland ones). She also...
Textual Features Maria Riddell
MR 's own twenty poems include prefatory verses as editor, written for the occasion. She prints work by the late Henrietta O'Neill (the well-known Ode to the Poppy), Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (St...
Textual Features Antonia Fraser
This book is character-driven in AF 's accustomed manner, featuring Whig reformers, Tory reactionaries, and those dubbed revolutionaries like Daniel O'Connell and William Cobbett . Its story opens in November 1831 with a famous pronouncement...
Textual Features Lady Caroline Lamb
The printed selection begins with girlhood letters to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire 's elder daughter. It goes on to include correspondence with friends and publishers, analyses of feelings and comments on the experience of pregnancy...
Textual Features Sarah Macnaughtan
In this novel a young woman named Hetty Du Cane goes for an autumn vacation with several others at a friend's house in the English countryside and meets several interesting people. Her love interest, Geoffrey...
Textual Features Sarah Green
The novel itself has elements of a spoof on the gothic, a didactic courtship plot, a social satire of the dialogue kind associated with Elizabeth Hamilton and Thomas Love Peacock , a sentimental melodrama, a...
Textual Features Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Volume three opens with a mock trial: the Crawleys hope to get innocent men (including the hero) condemned for insurrection; the English or Anglicised Irish aristocrats are flightily amused at performing a trial scene. The...

Timeline

22 March 1754: A group of Nobles, Clergy, Gentlemen, & Merchants...

Building item

22 March 1754

A group of Nobles, Clergy, Gentlemen, & Merchants met to establish what became the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

1771: In a year when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted,...

Women writers item

1771

In a year when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted, as Girl Reading, his niece Theophila Palmer perusing Richardson 's Clarissa, five novels by women advertised their Clarissa kinship.

1777: Henry Mackenzie published his sentimental...

Writing climate item

1777

Henry Mackenzie published his sentimental novelJulia de Roubigné, whose heroine is poisoned by the jealous husband she has married to please her father.

17 June 1783: Sir Cecil Wray, a maverick independent politician...

National or international item

17 June 1783

Sir Cecil Wray , a maverick independent politician and reformer, presented in the House of Commons a Quaker petition for the abolition of slavery.

5 November 1788-10 March 1789: George III's illness and palpable incapacity...

National or international item

5 November 1788-10 March 1789

George III 's illness and palpable incapacity produced the Regency Crisis: the issue was whether or not power would devolve to the Prince of Wales .

July 1796: The explorer Mungo Park, abandoned and anxious...

Building item

July 1796

The explorer Mungo Park , abandoned and anxious on the banks of the Niger River in what is now Mali, was taken in, housed and fed by African village women, who composed and sang...

24 December 1799: Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in the...

Writing climate item

24 December 1799

Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in the Morning Post his ode in praise of the poetry of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire .

9 June 1819: The library of the late Queen Charlotte was...

Building item

9 June 1819

The library of the late Queen Charlotte was auctioned by Christie's ; it included Jane Austen 's works, plus titles by Catherine Cuthbertson , Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , Christian Isobel Johnstone , Alethea Lewis

Texts

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. Emma. T. Hookham, 1773.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. Memorandums of the Face of the Country in Switzerland. Cooper and Graham, 1799.
Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. Sketch of a Descriptive Journey through Switzerland; The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard. J. J. Burgdorfer, 1816.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard. Prosper and Company, 1802.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,. The Sylph. T. Lowndes, 1779.
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. The Two Duchesses, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire. Editor Foster, Vere, Blackie and Son; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.