Lady Elizabeth Craven (1750-1828), later the Princess Berkeley and Margravine of Anspach, shared the international experience and cosmopolitan impulses of many writers and thinkers of the long eighteenth century.  Craven considered herself a literary citizen of the world: she lived on the Continent for a significant part of her life, and in addition to residences in France, Italy, and Germany, visited Poland, Russia, the Crimea, and Turkey.  ‘You know, Sir,’ she wrote to the sovereign of Anspach, ‘I have no English prejudices.  Mankind I consider as one large family, thrown over the world by chance, and dispersed about at random; and certain qualities of the soul make us find out such relations, as are most congenial to us in every country’. 

In the popular imagination, however, Lady Craven’s cosmopolitanism manifested itself as a series of continental sexual connections, which were the subject of media attention and social satire.  In her Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789), Craven worked to recast travel and these courtly European connections as a form of sovereign sociability that confirmed those noble identifications she found under threat in England and France.  This paper explores the ‘qualities of the soul’ that Craven represents as drawing together, even uniting, the ‘one large family’ that is ‘Mankind’.  How was international affective community imagined and maintained by the elite English woman in the late part of the eighteenth century?  How does Craven experience and represent these transnational identifications, and can they truly be construed as ‘cosmopolitan’?

Having recently completed her doctorate at the University of Melbourne (2009), Katrina O’Loughlin has joined the University of Western Australia as an Honorary Research Fellow. Her research interests include eighteenth-century English literary and material cultures with a focus on women’s writing, travel, and the representation of subjectivity and cultural difference. She has published on women's travel, writing, gender and identity, and taught in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Current projects include the development of her doctoral research for publication, and a proposed edition of two female-authored Russian travel narratives of the 1730's. She is also pursuing new research in the area of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanisms, with a focus on correspondence, cultural exchange and intellectual sociability in the second half of the century.