Born: 1 September 1789, Ireland
Died: 4 June 1849
Country most active: United Kingdom, Italy
Also known as: Margaret Power
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Sinéad Sturgeon and Frances Clarke. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Gardiner, Marguerite (Margaret) (1789–1849), countess of Blessington, writer, journalist, and society hostess, was born 1 September 1789 at Knockbrit, Co. Tipperary, the second daughter and fourth child of Edmund Power and his wife Ellen (née Sheehy), both from well-established catholic families. Margaret was a precocious child whose only education, from a family friend named Anne Dwyer, ended abruptly in 1797 when the Powers moved to Clonmel, where Edmund was engaged as a corn merchant. He was appointed magistrate in Tipperary and Waterford, and became notorious for his brutality in enforcing the law. He also pursued various business ventures, the failure of which imperilled the family finances and made domestic life increasingly difficult. In March 1804 Margaret was compelled to marry Captain Maurice St Leger Farmer, an army officer stationed in Clonmel. Farmer was reputedly a violent and abusive man, and she abandoned him after three months and returned home. Her movements over the next few years remain obscure, but she spent time in Cahir and Dublin and formed a close relationship with Captain Thomas Jenkins. About 1809 she settled at the latter’s home in Sidmanton, Hampshire, where she lived for five years, studying and reading widely to compensate for her curtailed education.
Around this time Margaret met Charles Gardiner (1782–1829), 2nd Viscount Mountjoy, later 1st earl of Blessington, and by 1816 she was living under his protection (he reputedly remunerated Jenkins with £10,000). The following year Captain Farmer died in a drunken fall, and on 16 February 1818 Margaret married Gardiner, becoming countess of Blessington; it was at this time that she changed her first name to Marguerite. The couple spent their honeymoon in Ireland, visiting Dublin and the Blessington estates in Co. Tyrone, before returning to London, where they settled at 11 St James’s Square. Lady Blessington soon established their richly furnished home as a leading venue for London society. Though she was regarded as insufficiently respectable to be visited by society women, Lady Blessington’s beauty, intelligence, and charm attracted the leading statesmen, artists, and writers of the day. Guests included Lord Palmerston, Earl Grey, George Canning, Thomas Moore, Thomas Lawrence (whose portrait of his hostess was exhibited at the RA in 1821 to sensational effect), John Galt, and Samuel Parr, who reportedly coined her well-known soubriquet ‘most gorgeous’. In 1821 Lady Blessington met the charismatic Alfred, Count D’Orsay, with whom she would maintain a lifelong association. In addition to this social success she began to write, and in 1822 anonymously published her first work, a collection of four essays entitled The magic lantern, or Sketches of scenes in the metropolis. This was followed in the same year by Sketches and fragments and Journal of a tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821.
In August 1822 the Blessingtons, accompanied by a lavish entourage of servants, set out on a continental tour that lasted for the rest of the decade. They spent some time in France, joined by D’Orsay at Avignon, before settling briefly at Genoa, where the countess formed a close friendship with Lord Byron. In 1827, during a sojourn in Naples, D’Orsay married Lady Harriet Gardiner, the daughter of the earl by a previous marriage. The newly-weds lived with the Blessingtons, and this arrangement, particularly after the death of the earl in Paris (1829), enhanced Lady Blessington’s scandalous reputation in fashionable London society. Her association with D’Orsay was the subject of much controversy and speculation, though it seems that the relationship was filial rather than sexual.
The earl’s death seriously diminished Lady Blessington’s income, yet on her return to London in 1830 she re-established a brilliant social salon in the extravagant surroundings of Seamore Place, Mayfair. Her circle of acquaintance widened, as the Disraelis, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Daniel Maclise, Charles Dickens, and Captain Marryat, among others, attended her soirées. Despite her strenuous attempts at social integration, D’Orsay’s separation from Harriet (who ran away from her household in 1831) confirmed her exclusion from respectable female society, and induced financial worries that were compounded by her numerous family dependents. She turned to writing as a means of income, publishing society novels or so-called silver fork fiction, as well as travel books and a diverse range of journalism. Two of her novels, Grace Cassidy, or The repealers (1833) and Country quarters (which appeared posthumously in 1850), were set in Ireland. She devoted considerable time to editing the annuals The book of beauty and The keepsake, writing much of the contents herself, but also soliciting contributions from the famous guests that frequented her salon. In 1832 she met S. C. Hall, who suggested that she record her friendship with Byron for his New Monthly Magazine. The resulting serial, ‘Journal of conversations of Lord Byron by the countess of Blessington’ (1832–3), attracted immense public interest. It was later published as a book, Conversations with Lord Byron (1834), which remains her most significant literary work and is still valued by biographers of the poet. Her protracted stay on the continent also provided her with material for much of her fiction, which is notable mainly for its shrewd observations of high society.
In 1836 Lady Blessington moved to Gore House, Kensington, where she continued to cultivate distinguished literary society, although her prodigious work rate exacted an increasing toll on her health. In addition to novels such as The victims of society (1837) and The governess (1839), she wrote the popular travel books Idler in Italy (3 vols, 1839–40) and Idler in France (2 vols, 1841). Despite her industry, her fiscal problems continued, and in 1849, the Irish famine having drastically reduced her income from the Blessington estates, she was declared bankrupt. She joined D’Orsay in Paris and the contents of Gore House were sold to meet her debts. She died 4 June 1849 from an apoplectic stroke at her apartment on rue du Circle, near the Champs Elysées, and was buried in Chambourcy, near St Germaine-en-Laye. Her niece Marguerite Power, who for many years assisted her literary work, enjoyed considerable success in her own right as a poet and novelist.
Archives of Lady Blessington’s papers and correspondence are held in New York Public Library; Princeton University Library; the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The most famous likeness is the portrait by Lawrence (c.1820), held in the Wallace Collection, London. Lithographs by Daniel Maclise and R. J. Lane, and drawings by P. E. Ströhling and G. Cattermole, are in the British Museum, London. Several likenesses are also held in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
BLESSINGTON, COUNTESS OF, Was born in Ireland, September 1st., 1789. Her maiden name was Marguerite Power; she was the second daughter of Edmund Power, Esq., of Carrabeen, in the county of Waterford. Marguerite Power was very beautiful, and married, at the early age of fifteen, Captain Farmer, of the forty-seventh regiment. He died in 1817; and, in the following year, Mrs. Farmer married her second husband, Charles John Gardner, Earl of Blessington. During the lifetime of the Earl he resided with Lady Blessington chiefly in Italy and France; and he died in Paris, in 1829. Lady Blessington returned soon afterwards to London, and devoted herself to literature. She was so prominent in the circle her rank, talents, accomplishments, and beauty drew around her, that her biography is familiar to all. She resided in London, till the troubles in Ireland had so embarrassed her estates in that country, that she was compelled to dispose of her house and all her property—her most cherished “household gods”—by public sale. In the Spring of 1849, she removed to Paris, where she intended to fix her residence, and died there, early in June, before she had fully established herself in her new home. Among the many testimonials to the generosity of her disposition, and the truth of her zeal in the service of her friends, is the following, which we quote from the “Art-Journal:”—
“She was largely indebted to Nature for surpassing loveliness of person and graceful and ready wit. Circumstances connected with the earlier years of her life (to which it is needless to refer) ‘told’ against her through the whole of her career; but we entirely believe that the Nature which gave her beauty, gave her also those desires to be good which constitute true virtue. Those who speak lightly of this accomplished woman, might have better means to do her justice if they knew but a tithe of the cases that might be quoted of her generous sympathy, her ready and liberal aid, and her persevering sustenance whenever a good cause was to be helped, or a virtuous principle was to be promulgated.”
She wrote with great facility and elegance of language, but her style is too diffuse, particularly in her novels. Her “Idler in Italy,” and “Conversations with Lord Byron,” are her best works; the last is very interesting, the subjects owing, probably, much to the spirit with which the hero of the book discourses. The list of Lady Blessington’s works is large, comprising the following:—”The Magic Lantern,” “Sketches and Fragments,” “Tour in the Netherlands,” “Conversations with Lord Byron,” “The Repealers,” “The Two Friends,” “The Victims of Society,” “The Idler in France,” “The Idler in Italy,” “The Governess,” “Confessions of an Elderly Lady,” “Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman,” “Desultory Thoughts,” “The Belle of a Season,” “Lottery of Life,” “Meredith,” “Strathern,” “Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre.” She wrote also several illustrated books of Poetry.