Born at Knockbrit, Tipperary, on the 1st of September, 1789. (The year, however, has been variously stated as 1787 and 1790). She was the daughter of Edmund Power, a country gentleman and magistrate, a man of violent temper and without principle. In 1796 or ’97 the Powers removed to Clonmel. In 1804, when she was under fifteen years of age, Marguerite was forced by her father into a marriage with the vicious and half-insane Captain Maurice Farmer. Within a year they agreed to separate. Mrs. Farmer is spoken of as residing in Cahir, Tipperary, in 1807, and in Dublin in 1809. And now occurs that hiatus in the account of her life which has never been satisfactorily filled, and the existence of which the English women of her day refused to overlook. In 1816 she was established in Manchester Square, London; and in 1818, Captain Farmer having died the previous year, she married the Earl of Blessington. Her fashionable life, foreign travels, and literary career now began. In 1823, while at Genoa with her husband, she made the acquaintance of Lord Byron. In 1829 Lord Blessington died in the Hotel Ney, Paris, which had been sumptuously fitted up as his residence. Lady Blessington returned to London in 1830. She lived in Seamore Place, May Fair, until 1836, when she removed to Gore House, Kensington Gore…. In the spring of 1849 “the long-menaced break-up of the establishment at Gore House took place.” Lady Blessington left London, accompanied by her nieces, for Paris, where, on the 4th of June, 1849, she died very suddenly of “an apoplectic malady, complicated with disease of the heart.”… The following are the works of Lady Blessington: “The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis,” 1822. “Sketches and Fragments,” 1822. “Conversations with Lord Byron,” 1832. These articles first appeared in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine. “Grace Cassidy; or, The Repealers,” 1833. “Meredyth,” 1833. “The Follies of Fashion,” 1835. “The Two Friends,” 1835. “The Victims of Society,” 1837. “The Confessions of an Elderly Lady,” 1839. “The Governess,” 1839. “Desultory Thoughts and Reflections,” 1839. “The Idler in Italy,” 1839. “The Idler in France,” 1841. “The Lottery of Life,” 1842. “Strathern; or, Life at Home and Abroad,” 1845. “The Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre,” 1846. “Lionel Deerhurst,” 1847. “Marmaduke Herbert,” 1847. “Country Quarters.” This were first published in a London Sunday paper, 1848. After Lady Blessington’s death it was edited by her niece, Miss Power, and published separately. She also wrote “A Tour Through the Netherlands to Paris,” “Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman,” “The Belle of a Season,” and edited for several years, Heath’s “Book of Beauty,” “The Keepsake,” and another annual entitled, “Gems of Beauty.”

Personal

  Irving walked about with me; called together at Lady Blessington’s, who is growing very absurd. “I have felt very melancholy and ill all this day,” she said. “Why is that,” I asked. “Don’t you know?” “No.” “It is the anniversary of my poor Napoleon’s death.”

  Lady Blessington is much more handsome than Countess Egloffstein, but their countenance, manners, and particularly the tone of voice, belong to the same class. Her dress rich, and her library most splendid. Her book about Lord Byron (now publishing by driblets in the “New Monthly Magazine”), and her other writings, give her in addition the character of a bel esprit. Landor, too, says, that she was to Lord Blessington the most devoted wife he ever knew. He says also, that she was by far the most beautiful woman he ever saw, and was so deemed at the Court of George IV. She is now, Landor says, about thirty, but I should have thought her older. She is a great talker, but her talk is rather narrative than declamatory, and very pleasant.

  The original is now (she confessed it very frankly) forty. She looks something on the sunny side of thirty. Her person is full, but preserves all the fineness of an admirable shape; her foot is not crowded in a satin slipper for which a Cinderella might long be looked for in vain, and her complexion (an unusually fair skin, with very dark hair and eyebrows) is of even a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her dress of blue satin … was cut low, and folded across her bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round and sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair of exquisite shoulders, while her hair dressed close to her head, and parted simply over her forehead with a rich ferronier of turquoise, enveloped in clear outline a head with which it would be difficult to find a fault. Her features are regular, and her mouth, the most expressive of them, has a ripe fullness and freedom of play peculiar to the Irish physiognomy, and expressive of the most unsuspicious good-humor. Add to all this a voice merry and sad by turns, but always musical, and manners of the most unpretending elegance, yet even more remarkable for their winning kindness, and you have the most prominent traits of one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever seen.

  In her lifetime she was loved and admired for her many graceful writings, her gentle manners, her kind and generous heart. Men, famous for art and science, in distant lands sought her friendship; and the historians and scholars, the poets and wits, and painters of her own country found an unfailing welcome in her ever-hospitable home. She gave cheerfully, to all who were in need, help and sympathy, and useful counsel; and she died lamented by many friends. Those who loved her best in life, and now lament her most, have reared this tributary marble over the place of her rest.

  I have never since beheld so pure and perfect a vision of female loveliness, in what I conceive to be its most perfect phase, that, namely, in which intellect does not predominate over form, feature, complexion, and the other physical attributes of female beauty, but only serves to heighten, purify and irradiate them; and it is this class of beauty which cannot be equalled on canvas…. At this time Lady Blessington was about six-and-twenty years of age; but there was about her face, together with that beaming intelligence which rarely shows itself upon the countenance till that period of life, a bloom and freshness which as rarely survive early youth, and a total absence of the undefinable marks which thought and feeling still more rarely fail to leave behind them. Unlike all other beautiful faces that I have seen, hers was, at the time of which I speak, neither a history nor a prophecy; not a book to read and study, a problem to solve, or a mystery to speculate upon, but a star to kneel before and worship.

  Beauty, the heritage of the family, was, in her early youth, denied to Marguerite: her eldest brother and sister, Michael and Anne, as well as Ellen and Robert, were singularly handsome and healthy children, while she, pale, weakly and ailing, was for years regarded as little likely ever to grow to womanhood; the precocity of her intellect, the keenness of her perceptions, and her extreme sensitiveness, all of which are so often regarded, more especially among the Irish, as the precursive symptoms of an early death, confirmed this belief, and the poor, pale, reflective child was long looked upon as doomed to a premature grave. The atmosphere in which she lived was but little congenial to such a nature. Her father, a man of violent temper, and little given to study the characters of his children, intimidated and shook the delicate nerves of the sickly child, though there were moments—rare ones, it is true—when the sparkles of her early genius for an instant dazzled and gratified him. Her mother, though she failed not to bestow the tenderest maternal care on the health of the little sufferer, was not capable of appreciating her fine and subtile qualities, and her brothers and sisters, fond as they were of her, were not, in their high health and boisterous gayety, companions suited to such a child.

  The peculiar character of Lady Blessington’s beauty seemed to be the entire, exact, and instantaneous correspondence of every feature, and each separate trait of her countenance, with the emotion of her mind, which any particular subject of conversation or object of attention might excite. The instant a joyous thought took possession of her fancy, you saw it transmitted as if by electrical agency to her glowing features: you read it in her sparkling eyes, her laughing lips, her cheerful looks; you heard it expressed in her ringing laugh, clear and sweet as the gay, joy-bell sounds of childhood’s merriest tones. There was a geniality in the warmth of her Irish feelings, an abandonment of all care, of all apparent consciousness of her powers of attraction, a glowing sunshine of good-humor and of good-nature in the smiles and laughter, and the sallies of wit of this lovely woman in her early and happy days (those of her Italian life, especially from 1823 to 1826), such as have been seldom surpassed…. Her voice was sweetly modulated and low. Its tones were always in harmonious concord with the traits of her expressive features…. All the beauty of Lady Blessington, without the exquisite sweetness of her voice, and the witchery of its tones in pleasing or expressing pleasure, would have been only a secondary attraction.

  Virtuous ladies! instead of censuring her faults, attempt to imitate her virtues. Believe that, if any excess may be run into, the excess of tenderness is quite as pardonable as that of malignity and rancour.

  Lady Blessington made a very pleasant impression upon me; and in the great circles, when the noble ladies asked me where I had been, I could not abstain from naming Lady Blessington. Then there always was a pause; I asked the reason why I was not to go there, or what was the matter with her, but I always got a short answer that she was not a good woman. One day I spoke of her personal amiability, and of her humor, and related how she was affected when talking of Jenny Lind’s representation of La Somnambula and the womanly nobility she manifested; I had seen her shed tears over it! “The creature!” exclaimed an old lady indignantly; “Lady Blessington weeping at the innocence of Jenny Lind!” A few years after I read of Lady Blessington’s death at Paris. Count d’Orsay sat at her death-bed.

  A thoughtful little poem written during the past summer for Lady Blessington has been quoted on a previous page: and it may remind me to say here what warmth of regard he [Dickens] had for her, and for all the inmates of Gore-house; how uninterruptedly joyous and pleasurable were his associations with them.

  She said a few kind words in that winning and gracious manner which no woman’s welcome can have ever surpassed; and from that moment till the day of her death in Paris, I experienced only a long course of kind constructions and good offices. She was a steady friend, through good report and evil report, for those to whom she professed friendship. Such faults as she had belonged to her position, to her past history, and to the disloyalty of many who paid court to her by paying court to her faults, and who then carried into the outer world depreciating reports of the wit, the banter, the sarcasm, and the epigram, which but for their urgings and incitements would have been always kindly, however mirthful. She must have had originally the most sunny of sunny natures. As it was, I have never seen anything like her vivacity and sweet cheerfulness during the early years when I knew her. She had a singular power of entertaining herself by her own stories; the keenness of an Irishwoman in relishing fun and repartee, strange turns of language, and bright touches of character. A fairer, kinder, more universal recipient of everything that came within the possibilities of her mind, I have never known.

  Of Lady Blessington’s tact, kindness, and remarkable beauty Procter always spoke with ardor, and abated nothing from the popular idea of that fascinating person. He thought she had done more in her time to institute good feeling and social intercourse among men of letters than any other lady in England, and he gave her eminent credit for bringing forward the rising talent of the metropolis without waiting to be prompted by a public verdict.

  Lady Blessington, fair, florid-complexioned, with sparkling eyes and white, high forehead, above which her bright brown hair was smoothly braided beneath a light and simple blonde cap, in which were a few touches of sky-blue satin ribbon that singularly well became her, setting off her buxom face and its vivid colouring.

  With the Countess of Blessington lived Count d’Orsay. As he, too, has often been described, I may dismiss him also with a few words. He had, it is well known, been married to the daughter of the Earl, and the step-daughter of the Countess of Blessington. The match, for some reason or other, proved unhappy. The Count, his wife, and the Countess of Blessington had at one time lived all three together, but after two years of this life the young Countess took leave of her husband and her step-mother, and from that time till their death, in various places and amid various fortunes, Count d’Orsay and the Countess of Blessington lived together. They were perfectly suited the one to the other, and evidently were deeply attached. But as to whether their relations were immoral, as they were equivocal, society had then, as now, strong suspicions, yet no absolute certainty. It is, however, but just to say that, in his last days, when the heavy hand of illness had already fallen on him, and the heavier hand of death was very near, and when already the Countess was dead, Count d’Orsay solemnly declared that he had never borne any love towards her but that of a son to a mother.

  Lady Blessington, when I saw her first, was residing at Seamore Place, Park Lane. That was in 1831…. Not long afterward she removed to Kensington Gore, and I had a general invitation to her “evenings.” At that period she was past her prime no doubt, but she was still remarkably handsome; not so perhaps if tried by the established canons of beauty; but there was a fascination about her look and manner that greatly augmented her personal charms. Her face and features were essentially Irish; and that is the highest compliment I can pay them. Although I knew her history sufficiently well, I attributed to this particular daughter of Erin her share of the “wild sweet briery fence that round the flowers of Erin dwells,” and felt conviction that for the unhappy circumstances of Lady Blessington’s early life, the sins of others, far more than her own, were responsible, and that she had been to a great extent the victim of circumstances. To that opinion I still hold—some thirty years after her death, and more than fifty since I first saw her. Her “evenings” were very brilliant. Her guests were the leading men of mark of the age, and of all countries. There was certainty of meeting some one who was thenceforward never to be forgotten. The sometime Emperor of the French was seldom absent.

  I do not remember the date of the Gore House catastrophe, but I well recollect the sorrow—in a mild form—that I felt when I heard that “The Book of Beauty” was no more, and that the editor, with her friend Count d’Orsay, had exhausted the patience of their creditors at last. Gore House and its contents were thrown open to public inspection previous to the auctioneer’s operations, when the female element made up for its enforced absence by crowding each room to suffocation. My first appearance at Gore House was on one of those public days. In a kind of boudoir there was a piece of sculpture which seemed greatly to interest some ladies, who formed a group round it which,—judging from its appearance—was composed of duchesses and marchionesses, and the like. On a cushion lay some marble hands of lovely form, exquisitely sculptured. “Oh, yes,” said one of the aristocratic group to the rest; “they are her own hands. I know the man who modelled them. He said he never saw more perfect hands, both in form and color.” I have the expression of some of those faces before me at this moment. Curiosity seemed to me the liveliest and the most prevailing, though now and again a haughty dame, after examining some startling evidence of extravagance, would assume an air which, being interpreted, said, “And this is the end of a wicked career. Thank goodness I have lived to see it!”

General

  Her style is always graceful in its total absence of affectation—she excels, too, in the constructiveness which we have some times fancied was peculiar to her sex,—in the power of weaving a plot.

  The fact of her existence as an authoress is an enigma, poor as her pretentions are; for while it is very difficult to write good books, it is not easy to compose even bad ones, and volumes have come forth under her name for which hundreds of pounds have been paid, because (Heaven only can tell how) thousands are found who will read them. Her “Works” have been published in America, in one huge folio, where it seems they meet with peculiar success; and this trash goes down, because it is written by a Countess, in a country where rank is eschewed, and equality is the universal passion. They have (or some of them) been likewise translated into German; and if all this is not proof of literary merit, or at least of success, what is? It would be not uninteresting to trace this current of success to its source, and to lay bare all the springs of the machinery which sustains her artificial character as an authoress…. Though I never met with any individual who had read any of her books, except the “Conversations with Byron,” which are too good to be hers, they are unquestionably a source of considerable profit, and she takes her place confidently and complacently as one of the literary celebrities of her day.

  If we judge of Lady Blessington’s powers by the influence she apparently wielded over men of talent, we shall estimate her intellectual gifts very highly. But this would be a false standard; for none are more impressible than men of genius to the fascinations of the soft voice, the bright eye, the beautiful dress, the rich furniture, which such a woman knows how to employ. If we judge of her by the descriptions of her conversation given us by admiring frequenters of her saloons, we shall again place her high on the list of intellectual women. But here, too, the standard would be a false one; for these same accessories lend a delusive charm to words, which, if spoken by an unknown person in a gingham dress, would never have arrested attention a single moment. It is a curious fact, that, of all these brilliant conversations, whose effects are so enthusiastically described, nothing is reported beyond the reach of very commonplace powers of talk. Of her writings, the novels of society, in which we might have supposed she would excel, in tone and style are uniformly flat. The characters are drawn without vigor; the dialogues are carried on without point; the stories display the very poorest invention; the reflections are superficial, and the morality of that shallow and obtrusive kind, which people of doubtful lives are ever ready to furnish in phrases to make up for the short-comings of their conduct. The conversations with Lord Byron, however, are vigorous and instructive; incomparably the best of her ladyship’s prose writings.

  Also an Irish lady, possessed of a good deal of talent, who worked hard as a journey-woman in the profession of letters, writing novels, editing albums and annuals, a fashion of the day, and turning her hand to any work that was offered.

  Despite a certain facility which she possessed, in common with many other women, for scribbling, it was a mistake (one of the many she made) for Lady Blessington to take up the rôle of a fashionable novelist. For a woman who spent her life as she did in society (where she was the stimulus of much mental activity), it was morally impossible to make any literary effort worthy of the name…. It is no reproach to Lady Blessington to say, that hardly anyone of the present day has ever read, or perhaps heard of, “The Two Friends, or, The Victims of Society,” which was one of her best attempts. Sir Walter Besant calls this “a horrid book,” and doubtless, according to the standard of to-day, this judgment is correct.