Stored away and forgotten for 200 years, the private journals of Elizabeth Hervey (1749 1820) vividly describe her life and times. Her teenage years were spent in luxury at Fonthill Splendens, home of her stepfather, Alderman William Beckford. She married a handsome army officer who turned out to be a gambler, and with him fled abroad to escape his creditors. Soon widowed and with two small children, she returned to England, and after a brief affair with a political radical poet, settled in London. Intelligent, independent and well-educated, Herveybecame associated with Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill set and the Bluestockings. Every day she wrote her journal, vividly describing theatre visits, family dramas, servants, friends, society gossip, politics, her visits to country houses and lengthy tours at home and abroad. As a novelist she was first published in 1788, launching a career that, while earning her a living, put strain on her relationship with her half-brother, William Beckford, author of the classic gothic novel Vathek and builder of the infamous Fonthill Abbey. Theirs was a complex relationship, marred by literary rivalry, and after a quarrel in 1798 they never met again. Over the years Hervey's social network widened to include Lord Byron, Richard and Maria Cosway, the Duchess of Devonshire, Eva Garrick, Lady Hamilton and Sarah Siddons. Yet just as vivid in her journals are her accounts of her household servants, her relationship with her sons, her problems with ill health (and drastic remedies) and her financial ups and downs. As a lively and entertaining window into late Georgian society, there are few sources to rival Elizabeth Hervey's journals. AUTHOR: Dr Dianne Barre read history at Exeter University, followed by a research MA at Birmingham University. She worked in university adult education and taught sixteenth to eighteenth-century architectural and garden history. After retiring she completed a PhD at Bristol University, co-authored a book on Staffordshire's Historic Gardens, and published Historic Parks and Gardens of Derbyshire in 2017. She has also published articles in Garden History and The Georgian Group Journal. Like Mrs Hervey she is an enthusiastic hands-on gardener and visitor to country gardens and houses, and also enjoys visiting other people's gardens. 27 colour, 16 b/w illustrations