Elisabeth Pepys

Elisabeth de St Michel was born in Devon in 1640 to a family with French connections and married Samuel Pepys in 1655, shortly before her fifteenth birthday. Their marriage became one of the major domestic threads in the diary Pepys kept from 1660 to 1669.

The diary records affection, arguments, jealousy, household management, travel and the strains caused by Samuel’s repeated sexual pursuits of other women. Because Elisabeth left little surviving testimony of her own, her historical identity has often been filtered through her husband’s observations. She died in 1669, probably from typhoid, at the age of twenty-nine.