Lady Elizabeth Foster, played by Hayley Atwell
Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman
Never was a story more proper for a novel than poor Lady Elizabeth Foster’s (wrote Mrs. Dillon). She is parted from her husband, but would you conceive any father with the income he has should talk of her living alone on such a scanty pittance as £300 a year! And this is the man who is ever talking of his love of hospitality and his desire to have his children about him! Might one not imagine that he would be oppos’d to a pretty young woman of her age living alone? It is incredible the cruelties that monster Foster made her undergo with him; her father knows it, owned him a villain, and yet, for fear she should fall on his hands again, tried to persuade her to return to him.
To compound matters, the Earl managed to ‘forget’ Bess’s allowance whenever it came due.
Mrs. Dillon’s horror at Bess’s situation – respectable but alone and without financial support – was understandable. Fanny Burney wrote The Wanderer to highlight the dreadful vulnerability of such women to pimps and exploitation. Their status demanded that appearances they could not afford shuld be maintained while the means to make an independent living were denied them. Bess’s newly inherited title made it impossible for her to find work either as a governess or a paid companion. She could easily fall for a man who offered her a better life as his mistress, hence Mrs. Dillon’s amazement at Lord Bristol’s lack of concern. Many years later Bess tried to defend her subsequent conduct to her son:
Pray remember, when you say that my enthusiasm has had a fair and well-shaped channel, that I was younger than you when I was without a guide; a wife and no husband, a mother and no children .... by myself alone to steer through every peril that surrounds a young woman so situated; books, the arts, and a wish to be loved and approved .... a proud determination to be my own letter of recommendation .... with perhaps a manner than pleased, realised my projects, and gained me friends wherever I have been.
A wish to be loved and approved, and a manner that pleased: it was an irresistible combination to Georgiana.
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