Elizabeth Browne

Biography

Elizabeth Lyttelton, the main compiler of Cambridge University Library MS Additional 8460, was the third of the seven daughters of Sir Thomas Browne and Dorothy Mileham. She was born circa 1648, and lived most of her first thirty-two years in her parents' home in Norwich, where her father had moved in 1637 to practice medicine. On 19 December 1680 she married Captain George Lyttelton in her father's parish church, a happy match according to her mother (""Hee is of a very good Humor and Temprat as can be and sartainly as a greable as ever Cuple war""; Keynes, Works, IV, p. 176, letter 123 (17 December 1680)). By June 1681 she was living in Guernsey with him, where he had an official post. The couple were living in Windsor by 1712 (George died there in 1717) and Elizabeth was apparently still alive in 1728, when she was mentioned in her first cousin Edward Tenison's will (G.C.R. Morris, ""Sir Thomas Browne's Daughters, "Cosen Barker", and the Cottrells"", Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 472-79 (p. 473); Keynes, Commonplace Book, pp. 6-8; Keynes, Works, IV, pp. 198-99, letter 142 (20 June 1681)). This is the man to whom she gave her miscellany on 11 March 1713/14, as a note on the back page (p. 174) records. Items in her miscellany indicate that Lyttelton shared her father's royalism and his religious conformity.