Talk:Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire

Novelist? Really?
The article currently claims that the subject is "best known as an early woman novelist", but no details of any novels are supplied. I do wonder if there is confusion with the unrelated Elizabeth Hervey nee Marsh (1748-1820) who wrote seven novels. More details: http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=hervel

Michaelpeverett (talk) 11:47, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * There may also be some confusion with the American novelist Elizabeth Foster (1905-1963), who wrote an intensively researched 1960 biographical novel about Lady Elizabeth Foster entitled Children of the Mist. (The dust jacket describes the book as "classified as fiction", though the subtitle on the book's title page merely labels it, misleadingly, as "A True and Informal Account of an Eighteenth-Century Scandal".)  The novelist Foster is characterized on the dust jacket as "[a]n ardent Anglophile [who] has spent much of her life in England [although] her roots are firmly embedded in the State of Maine", also describing her as "[n]o relation to the heroine of the story"; oddly, though, the author includes no such genealogical denial in her prefatory Author's Note, and in fact refers ambiguously to Lady Elizabeth Foster as a woman "whose name, for many reasons, I was [during the period of research and writing] proud to bear".
 * The only thing the novelist says in her Author's Note about her Foster-named relatives is that her father was a certain Maximilian Foster. (Based on the dust jacket's mention that he had noteworthy literary connections, it can be inferred that he was the successful California-born writer of that name, 1871-1943.)  She also mentions that her interest in Lady Elizabeth Foster was sparked by an engraving of the latter (after the Reynolds portrait) that her (the novelist's) maternal grandfather, the lawyer, businessman, and avocational literary scholar Frederick Stoever Dickson (1850-1925), had given as a wedding gift to her mother, the former Elizabeth Dickson.  (Perhaps Mr. Dickson was simply amused that his daughter had as a result of marriage become another "Elizabeth Foster"; if so, he was likely also amused years later when his granddaughter was given that name.) 73.126.90.138 (talk) 19:33, 25 September 2022 (UTC)