It appears to have been in the year 1779 that Lady Craven discovered the infidelities with which she charged her husband, when she requested of him the favor "that he would not permit his mistress to call herself Lady Craven." After an interval of about three years spent in partial reconciliation, a separation took place. The indifferent tone in which she treats the whole of this transaction, and her professed readiness to overlook every slight that was not public and glaring, are a stain on her character, which she has by her own animated pen exhibited to an age which had forgotten the accusations to which she was subjected. At the time of her separation from her husband she was the mother of seven children.
Lady Craven had in the mean time produced her first play, "The Sleepwalker," a translation from the French, printed in 1778, at her friend Walpole's press at Strawberry Hill. In 1779 she published "Modern Anecdotes of the Family of Kinvervankotsprakengatchdern, a Tale for Christmas." This was a caricature of the ceremonious pomposity of the petty German courts; it was dramatized by Mr. M. P. Andrews. Soon after the separation, she passed some time in France, where she met with the Margrave of Anspach. They formed a sudden friendship for each other, and agreed to consider each other (we are told) as brother and sister. In June, 1785, Lady Craven commenced a tour, in which, starting from Paris, she passed by the Rhine to Italy, went thence by the Tyrol to Vienna, passed on to Warsaw, Petersburg, and Moscow, proceeded by the Don to Turkey, and returned by Vienna, which she reached in August, 1786. On this occasion she ran, by her own account, a serious risk of being made Empress of Austria. In 1789 she published an account of her tour (1 vol. 4to), in letters addressed to the margrave, saying in the dedication, "Beside curiosity, my friends will in these letters see, at least for some time, where the real Lady Craven has been, and where she is to be found--it having been the practice for some years past for a Birmingham coin of myself to pass in most of the inns in France, Switzerland, and England, for the wife of my husband. My arms and coronet sometimes supporting in some measure this insolent deception; by which, probably, I may have been seen to behave very improperly." This work is interesting from the many sketches it contains of eminent people--such as the Empress Catharine, the Princess Dashcoff, Prince Potemkin, Count Romanzoff, Admiral Mordvinoff, the Duc de Choiseul, and others. It is full of accurate observation and lively description, expressed in clear and simple English--a style from which in later life she considerably diverged. She descended into the grotto of Antiparos, being the first female to undertake the adventure. The French biographers maintain that the tameness of her description of the scene shows a deficiency of appreciation of the wonderful and sublime. She does not indeed ornament her description with hyperboles and exclamations, but it is clear and expressive, and by the distinctness of the impression which it conveys to the reader, shows that the scene was fully noticed and comprehended by the writer. After her return from her journey, she visited England to see her children, and then proceeded to France, where she joined the margrave and accompanied him to Anspach. Here, during a residence of a few years, she established a theatre, which was chiefly supplied with dramatic entertainments of her own composition. They were collected into two volumes 8vo, under the title of "Nouveau Théâtre d'Anspach et de Triesdorf," the latter being the name of a country seat nine miles from Anspach, where she laid out a park and garden in the English manner. She established at the same time "a society for the encouragement of arts and sciences." She soon afterwards visited, in company with the margrave, the congenial court of Naples, where she made the acquaintance of Sir William and Lady Hamilton. Her conduct was the subject of much censure both in England and among the officials of the court of Anspach, to whom her interference was a natural subject of distrust; and if it should even be admitted that her own account of the purity of her motives and conduct is correct, it cannot be denied that she afforded material for forming the worst interpretations of them. She maintains that she always opposed the cession of his dominions to the crown of Prussia by the margrave in 1791, but she was almost his sole adviser on the occasion. She states that she received the first hint of his design at Naples. One day while she was dressing for dinner, a servant intimated that the margrave desired to see her.