Beschreibung
7, [1], 415, [1]p, engraved folding map and 2 folding engraved plates [as required] at the end. 8vo. Sl. browning, mainly to final gatherings. Full contemporary calf, gilt banded spine, red morocco label; minor crack to upper joint but firm, sl. wear to board tips. 19th century signature of John Rutherford D'Olier (1816-1899) at head of titlepage, armorial bookplate with his name, written in a young hand dated 1831 beneath. He was a Dublin born barrister. ESTC T63309, Belfast, BL, Cambridge, Nat Lib Ireland, Senate House; 17 copies in America. After thirteen years of marriage to Baron William Craven, six children and a scandalous life, Elizabeth separated from her husband in 1773, settled in France and thereafter travelled extensively. During the years 1785-86, she travelled through Central Europe to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and the Crimea, from where she sailed to Constantinople. She visited the Greek islands of Andros, Siphnos, Naxos, Antiparos, Melos, and by way of Smyrna ended up again at the Bosporus. On her return trip, she stayed in the Danube capitals of Jassy (Ia i) and Bucharest. She became acquainted with Phanariot circles and travelled throughout Moldavia and Wallachia quite comfortably and without trouble. She offers good descriptions, albeit tinted with the English aristocrat's irony, of the Greek women of the islands and their diversions, the music of the Greeks, the Sublime Porte's appointment of Phanariot Nicholas Mavrogenes as Prince of Wallachia and his departure from Constantinople, as well as of her voyage on a Turkish vessel with a Greek captain, from the Black Sea port of Sebastopol to the Ottoman capital. At Ansbach she began an affair with Christian Frederick Charles Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Bayreuth. On the death of Elizabeth's first husband, in 1791, the Margrave sold his Prussian estates and they returned to London to live in Hammersmith at Brandenburg House, where she continued to write. She went on to publish her journey, written as a series of letters to her future husband, as A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 91585
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