Commissioner's Daughter

When Elizabeth Proby, the daughter of the Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard, married the brilliant young Russian admiral Pavel Chichagov, she exchanged the orderly world of Jane Austen for the epic stage of Tolstoy's War and Peace. This is the story of Elizabeth's upbringing in Chatham and her subsequent life in the fashionable society of St Petersburg in the opening years of the nineteenth century, before her early death at the age of 36.
Elizabeth's response to the alien world in which she found herself and her crucial role in the life of her husband make absorbing reading. Moreover, the author's account of Chichagov's lasting passion for his English wife, of his complex personality and of his meteoric rise to become head of the Russian navy under the Emperor Alexander I illuminates a long-neglected historical figure.
Joanna Woods has combined a study of both published and unpublished historical sources in England, France and Russia with a sensitive portrayal of a marriage. The result is a picture of the private and public life of the Chichagovs which readers will find compelling.