A secret marriage.
Coded love affairs.
A queer Regency household reconstructed from unpublished journals and letters.
A Hidden Life at Naples.
The world remembers Keppel Craven as the son of the scandalous Margravine of Anspach, vice-chamberlain to the Princess of Wales, travel writer and constant companion of Sir William Gell.
He was all of these things.
But the journal he kept assiduously for more than forty-five years tells another story. Beneath the polished surface of his public persona, Keppel Craven was a man of secrets. He carefully concealed unsavory quarrels. He notated his sexual encounters in code. Mary Carter—whose name and initials appear sporadically from 1809 to 1850—seems to have been the central love of his life, while X Anacharsis (X for sex, and Anacharsis his nickname for Sir William Gell) proves Craven was more than just friends with the archaeologist.
Keppel Craven was painfully aware he was famous. He understood that, after his own death, his journals could be published for all the world to read. The result is a record riddled with omissions, disguises and misdirection. Financial support of Gell becomes repayment of a loan from Gell’s servant. An annuity purchased for Mary’s daughter is passed off as a pension for a former valet. The names of male lovers are feminized, and those of women are hidden in doodles, or recorded with initials.
Yet read closely and Craven’s hidden life comes into view.
He could not live without Sir William Gell. Andrea Pasquini was both secretary and lover. Hundreds of soldiers, watermen and servants—and not a few famous women—were marked down in Craven’s journals as conquests. And running through this world of queer relationships, secrecy, jealousy, dependency and deep abiding love is the constant presence of the parson's daughter: Mary Carter, the glue that held everything together.
This website follows the research behind The Wife and the Mistress: the unpublished journals and letters, the portraits, the codes, the scandals and the people who lived inside a Regency arrangement almost no one was meant to see.
The Wife and the Mistress:
The Memoirs of the Mistress of the Hon. Keppel Craven
A three-volume biographical novel drawn from journals, letters and long-buried secrets.
Mary Carter was a respectable wife and mother when she fell in love with the Hon. Keppel Craven—younger than herself, amiable and fetching, but with secrets far stranger than society guessed. She became his mistress. Through her, we enter Keppel's highly public world and the queer, anxious and devoted one beneath.
Volume 1: Nereid, 1796-1814.
Mary’s happiness is upended when her husband befriends Keppel Craven. Nereid follows Mary’s love for Keppel and her gradual integration into his hidden life, rife with rivalry, anxiety and surprises.
Volume 2: Anacharsis, 1814-1825.
Mary and Keppel’s story continues as they navigate the court of the scandalous Princess of Wales, the politics of Naples, the queer temptations of an Italian life, and the heart of Sir William Gell.
Volume 3: Andreina, 1825-1851.
The conclusion of The Wife and the Mistress, in which Mary finds herself at the nexus of someone else’s love triangle: the seductress, the mediator, Keppel’s refuge when everything goes wrong. Through cholera, war and addiction, the couple endure, until Keppel’s anxieties drive him toward a shocking decision, and he is forced to face the cruelest threat of all.
Coming soon.
Follow the research behind The Wife and the Mistress.
