ABSTRACT
While the notoriety of their stepmother, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, has resulted in her receiving steady attention as a woman author from her time to the present day, one must look hard to find traces of the duke’s daughters by his first wife, Elizabeth Bassett. Frances, the youngest, is hardly ever mentioned except on genealogical tables. Jane,
the eldest, fares slightly better, having been the recipient of a poem by William Davenant on her marriage to Charles Cheyne.2 She also appears in biographies of the duchess as being in opposition to her father’s remarriage, although little concrete evidence is cited.3 Elizabeth, Lady Brackley, later the countess of Bridgewater, is seldom cited in connection with her father; instead, she has been recorded in the role of the perfect and pious wife of the 2nd Earl of Bridgewater. Even though she married into the family for whom Comus was written, with her husband one of its principal actors, the usual references to her are the epitaphs which her grieving husband caused to have carved on their tombstones.4
