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The Countess of Blessington as Writer and Editor

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British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Part of the book series: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters ((19CMLL))

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Abstract

When Lady Oriel and Mrs. Forrester, two characters in Blessington’s novel The Repealers, visit the London opera, Lady Oriel, an experienced socialite, and her sister-in-law, who has just arrived from rural Ireland, discuss who else of renown is present:

The lady leaving the box next Lady Kidney’s, is the authoress of, what shall I say, half the popular novels of the day, among which there is not a single failure; her books give you all the sparkle of fashionable life, without any of its inanity, and her fecundity of imagination is as extraordinary as her facility of language; she appears never to tire herself, and certainly never tires her readers, for she is always brilliant and often profound. (R 2: 229–230)

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Notes

  1. According to Sadleir, this passage describes Catherine Gore; Michael Sadleir, Blessington-d’Orsay: A Masquerade [1933] (London: Folio Society, 1983), 182.

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  2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 577–579, here 579, 1. 69.

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  3. Terence Allan Hoagwood and Kathryn Ledbetter, “Colour’d Shadows”: Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 84.

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  6. In 1979, an abbreviated version of Blessington’s Idler in Italy appeared: Lady Blessington at Naples, ed. Edith Clay, with an introduction by Harold Acton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).

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  7. See Kathryn Walchester, “Our Own Fair Italy”: Nineteenth Century Women’sTravel Writing and Italy 1800–1844 (Bern: Lang, 2007), 12. This study treats women’s travelogues about Italy: Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy (1800), Charlotte Eaton’s Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1820), Lady Morgan’s Italy (1821), Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), and Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844).

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  9. For list of guests in Naples, see MA 1: 113–114. The friendship Blessington struck up with Walter Savage Landor in Florence led to an exchange of poems and letters; see John F. Mariani, “The Letters of Walter Savage Landor to Marguerite Countess of Blessington,” unpubl. PhD thesis (New York: Columbia University, 1973). The Pforzheimer collection holds a copy. Landor and Blessington stayed friends after her return to London; see John F. Mariani, “Lady Blessington’s ‘Ever Obliged Friend and Servant, W. S. Landor’: A Study of Their Literary Relationship,” The Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976): 17–30. Fox’s diary repeatedly makes unfriendly comments about her, for example: “The whole family bore me to extinction… She [Blessington] writes on life and manners. I wish she would acquire some of the latter before she criticises… She forces herself into the correspondence or acquaintance of all who have (unhappily for them) acquired any sort of fame.” See The Journal of the Hon. Edward Fox (Afterwards Fourth and Last Lord Holland), 1818–1830, ed. Earl of Ilchester (London: Butterworth, 1923), 204. Fox also voiced disgust about the marriage between Harriet and D’Orsay.

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  17. For an analysis of The Repealers, see Riana O’Dwyer, “Travels of a Lady of Fashion: The Literary Career of Lady Blessington (1789–1849),” in New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose, ed. Heidi Hansson (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), 35–54, here 45–53.

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  32. See also Susanne Schmid, “Lady Blessington und die Salons der englischen Romantik,” in Subversive Romantik, ed. Volker Kapp, Helmuth Kiesel, Klaus Lubbers, and Patricia Plummer (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004), 153–164, here 160.

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  33. Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil: British Society in Egypt, 1768–1956 (London: Dent, 1988), 42–43.

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  36. For an analysis see Ann R. Hawkins and Jeraldine R. Kraver, “Introduction,” in Marguerite Blessington, Victims of Society, ed. Ann R. Hawkins and Jeraldine R. Kraver, vol. 4 of Silver Fork Novels, 1826–1841, ed. Harriet Devine Jump, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), vii–xxvi, here xxii-xxvi; O’Cinneide, Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 56–59.

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  40. For passages alluding to Blessington and her circle, see Rosina Bulwer, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, vol. 5 of Jump, Silver Fork Novels, 1826–1841, 324–331, 335–336, 357, 370–372 Resolution Global. Lady Stepstray is a mixture of Blessington and Stepney. Here, as in other romans à clef, real-life and fictitious characters do not always stand in a one-to-one relationship to one another.

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  41. The Collected Letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts with the assistance of Steve Carpenter, 3 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatte, 2008), 1: 210, 208.

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  43. Newton Crosland, Rambles Round My Life: An Autobiography (1819–1896) (London: Allen, 1898), 356. Mrs. Crosland worked her way up to become subeditor of Friendship’s Offering and received “liberal remuneration” (356). On her contributions and income, see Crosland, Rambles Round My Life, 345–357.

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  49. Ibid., 98–99; the poem is Camilla Toulmin, “On the Portrait of Mrs. Burr,” in Heath’s Book of Beauty, 1843, ed. Marguerite Blessington (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), 210–211. (http://www.britannuals.com/mes/mespl-2.php?siteID=britannuals&pageref=21).

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© 2013 Susanne Schmid

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Schmid, S. (2013). The Countess of Blessington as Writer and Editor. In: British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137063748_7

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