Arabella Fermor

Portrait after Peter Lely

Arabella Fermor (1696–1737) was the daughter of a marriage between two Roman Catholic families in Protestant England, the Tusmores of Oxfordshire and the Brownes of Berkshire. Her beauty was made famous by her starring role in Alexander Pope's famous poem The Rape of the Lock. After her beau Robert Petre brought about the dissolution of their engagement by stealing a lock of her hair (satirically related in the poem), Fermor married Francis Perkins of Ufton Court around 1715. She bore one daughter, Arabella, who died as a child, and five sons.^[1]

References

1. David Nash Ford's Royal Berkshire History, 2001, edited from A. Mary Sharp's "History of Ufton Court" (1892), http://www.berkshirehistory.com/bios/afermor.html