The Travel Writings Of Marguerite Blessington

This book derives from the conviction that Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, and thus offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books: ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841). It argues that travelling and travel writing provided Blessington with endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This book derives from the conviction that Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, and thus offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books: ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841). It argues that travelling and travel writing provided Blessington with endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This new biography of Lady Blessington, the first in more than eighty years, illuminates the private and public life of this important but neglected salonnière and author. This study enriches our knowledge of the social, political, and literary history of the post-Romantic and early Victorian era. It examines Lady Blessington’s close friendships with politicians and writers, especially Edward Bulwer Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli. Statesmen, diplomats, writers, and artists were her constant visitors, as they found her friendship and conversation invaluable to their professional and social lives. The circumstances of a life lived in luxury and indulgence changed upon the death of Lady Blessington’s husband, forcing her to support herself and several dependents with her writing. Throughout this biography, Lady Blessington’s voice is evident and should reawaken scholarly and popular interest in her voluminous works. She wrote twenty novels in genres including silver-fork fiction, psychological drama, and verse narrative. She also produced four travel books, many short stories, and numerous poems and edited the popular literary gift annuals Heath’s Book of Beauty and The Keepsake. This book reveals the humanity of a woman whom contemporary gossip considered scandalous because of her alleged relationship with her stepdaughter’s estranged husband, Count D’Orsay. Lady Blessington’s struggle in the face of many challenges is an inspiring story of individual strength. It is a tale of a woman whose legacy of integrity, determination, and sheer hard work provides us with enlarged insights into an era and society often overlooked by history.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Marguerite Blessington, who had been born in Ireland but spent most of her life in London, became a famous salonnière; she was generally regarded as an important contemporary author, but as no literary executor took care of her oeuvre posthumously, she eventually moved into the background. Her novels, partly informed by the silver-fork genre, are typical examples of Romantic Victorianism, influenced by the Romantic cult of the solitary male self, by the fascination with Italy, and by the 1840s vogue of crime fiction, while simultaneously giving space to ambivalent reflections about Blessington’s own Irish background. This volume, as part of ‘Chawton House Library: Women’s Novels’ series, presents her 1847 novel Marmaduke Herbert; or, the Fatal Error, a highly popular piece of fiction in its day, being reprinted in German, French and American editions within a year of its publication.

This three-volume work (first published in 1839-40) describes the author's life travelling in Italy, France and Switzerland.

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.

This three-volume work (first published in 1839-40) describes the author's life travelling in Italy, France and Switzerland.

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians' handling of the saints and the saints' lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.