Author: Trefusis, Elizabeth
Biography:
TREFUSIS, Elizabeth (1762-1808: Beloe)
She was born on 16 Jan. and baptised 28 Jan. 1762 at St. James, Piccadilly, London, the eldest of at least five children of Robert Cotton Trefusis (1742-78) and his wife Anne St. John (1739-76), daughter of Baron St. John of Bletsoe, Bedfordshire. They had married the previous year in a private ceremony at her family house in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. William Beloe’s account of Elizabeth Trefusis in The Sexagenarian (1817) is colourful and indiscreet but not demonstrably inaccurate. He was an admirer and shared her adoration of monarchical government and rage against the French Revolution and its supporters. However, he records that she “was extravagantly fond of poetry” and told how “her captivating manners, her high birth, her connections, her talents, necessarily drew a crowd of young men about her, for many of whom, in their turns, she suffered love.” Two of her attachments were later identified as the Duke of York and Major Barrie. Subject to enthusiasms, “wild, romantic and ingenious,” she lost her fortune due to her “profuse liberality” and to “artifice and fraud.” Towards the end of her life friends suggested she publish by subscription, resulting in the volumes listed here, which also contained a portrait. Publication was announced in April 1808. She dedicated the work to her friend and fellow Anti-Jacobin William Gifford (q.v.), who attended her in her final days. She died on 9 Sept. 1808 at her house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, Westminster, and was buried at St. Margaret’s on 14 Sept., leaving what little she had to her sister, Barbara Crowley Trefusis. William Gifford is said to have organised her funeral and may have paid for it. She also wrote but did not publish two novels, “Claribell” and “Eudora,” and a pastoral romance, “The Cousins”--poems from which she included in Poems and Tales. The British Library copy of Poems and Tales contains 26 pages of unpublished manuscript poems. (William Beloe, The Sexagenarian [1817], 1: 368-84; ancestry.co.uk 22 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 22 Nov. 2022; Morning Chronicle 18 Apr. 1808; Exeter Flying Post 15 Sept. 1808; GM Sept. 1808, 859; Spenserians; West Country Poets, 447-8; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis [1878], 2: 744; BL.11641.a. 57, 58; William Bates, N&Q 21 Apr. 1860, 300-2) AA
Other Names:
- Miss Trefusis