Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
-
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 Much of her work remains unpublished and her canon, both in prose and poetry, is far from certain.
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
