Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–1893)

Elizabeth Rigby was the daughter of a physician and amateur classical scholar, Edward Rigby, and his wife Anne Palgrave. She was privately educated, learning French, German, and Italian, and studying art at the British Museum and the National Gallery. As a young woman, she travelled extensively in Europe and Russia. She published her first translation of an essay from the German in 1833. Her first book, A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841), a collection of her letters and travel journals, brought her literary fame and an invitation to be the first woman to contribute articles to the Quarterly Review. In 1842, she moved with her widowed mother and siblings to Edinburgh, where she moved in intellectual circles. She published two novels, The Jewess (1843) and Livonian Tales (1846). A pioneering female journalist, she became known for a sarcastic prose style; she attracted much attention for a particularly scathing review of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. In 1849, at age 40, she married Charles Eastlake, former keeper of the National Gallery and future president of the Royal Academy, and moved to London with him. Her husband was knighted in 1850, making her Lady Eastlake. Among her artistic and literary friends in London were Edwin Henry Landseer, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle. In 1854, Lady Eastlake sided with Effie Gray, the neglected wife of John Ruskin, in her petition to obtain an annulment of the marriage. The Eastlakes made regular trips to Europe, especially Italy, broadening Lady Eastlake's understanding of art history. In 1855, her husband was appointed the first director of the National Gallery and she became involved in decisions about acquisitions for the museum. Her other works included the translation of G.F. Waagen’s Treasure of Art in Great Britain (1854); the completion of Anna Brownell Jameson's History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art (1864); Fellowship: Letters Addressed to my Sister Mourners (1868), about the death of her husband; and Five Great Painters (1883), a collection of her essays. She also edited and published her husband’s Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts (1870).