Born: 30 July 1781, United Kingdom
Died: 4 February 1863
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: L.L.D.B., L.C.B., Louisa Catherine de Beaufort
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Zoë Van Cauwenberg. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Beaufort, Louisa Catherine (‘L. C. B.’; ‘L. L. D. B.’; ‘Louisa Catherine de Beaufort’) (1781–1863), antiquarian, artist, entomologist and writer, was born on 30 July 1781 in Penylan, Carmarthenshire, Wales, daughter of the Rev. Daniel Augustus Beaufort, Church of Ireland clergyman, cartographer and founding member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), and Mary Beaufort (née Waller, 1739–1831), of Allenstown House, Co. Meath. Beaufort was the youngest of seven children. Her siblings included Frances Anne Beaufort (1769–1865), later Frances Edgeworth, future stepmother of Maria Edgeworth; William Louis Beaufort (1771–1849), Church of Ireland clergyman in Co. Cork; Francis Beaufort, naval officer, hydrographer and later admiral; Mary Anne Beaufort (1776–91), who died from an unspecified illness in her teens; Henrietta (Harriet) Beaufort (1778–1865), writer and educational author; and one unnamed sister who died shortly after birth.
Beaufort’s early life was spent on the move, as her father’s financial problems had chased the family from Ireland to find cheaper accommodation in Wales, where she was born. The family moved from Penylan to Piercefield, Monmouthshire (Wales) in 1782, where they lived for fourteen months before settling in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (England) in December 1783. In April of the following year, the family prepared to return to Ireland after a five-year absence, having struggled to find a house in Gloucester. This move was, as noted by Mary Beaufort in her diary, for the benefit of the children’s ‘indispensable’ education (TCD, MS 4025, f. 99). The family first settled in the north of Dublin and during this time, Beaufort and her sister Henrietta attended a boarding school at Clontarf, Co. Dublin. The family moved to Collon, Co. Louth, after Daniel Beaufort was offered the parish there in August 1789.
Little else is known about Beaufort’s formal education, but it appears she enjoyed a liberal education at home, having access to her father’s extensive library. Beaufort was well-read, familiar with classical and historical texts, had a good understanding of natural history, botany, art and architectural history, and was familiar with ecclesiastical and spiritual writings. Given her father’s involvement with the RIA (he was its librarian from 1788–91), from an early age Beaufort was exposed to antiquarian debates and scholarship. It is likely that she was also encouraged to pursue artistic and musical interests, as Daniel Beaufort’s daughters helped to illustrate and colour his topographical map of Ireland.
From her teens, Beaufort travelled throughout Ireland with members of her family, visited relatives in Allenstown, Co. Meath, and, following the marriage of her older sister Frances Anne to Richard Lovell Edgeworth in 1798, she would occasionally sojourn in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford. She accompanied her parents and brother William to England in 1794 and joined her parents on their tours of Ireland in 1807, 1808 and 1810. Two of Beaufort’s travel journals have been preserved. The earliest documents tours of the north of Ireland (8 October–19 November 1807) and a Charter School tour (23 August–29 September 1808) and is kept in the library of Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The second recounts her travels in the south-west of Ireland and Co. Meath between August 1842 and February 1843 and is kept in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Diary entries predominantly concern the weather and road conditions and detail her encounters with the landscape, monuments and people. As a member of a respected household, she gained entry to various country houses in Ireland, and her diaries offer insight into their interiors. Her descriptions of material culture are detailed, showing her interest and knowledge of architecture and art, occasionally including listings of art objects or rough sketches of floor-plans or buildings.
Beaufort was the first woman to present a paper to the RIA (22 October 1827) and the first woman to publish her research in its journal; her ‘Essay upon the state of architecture and antiquities of Ireland, previous to the landing of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland’ was published in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in 1828. Drawing on her own extensive travels and on those of her parents, Beaufort discussed several Irish monument sites in a lengthy essay that was illustrated with her own sketches, heavily annotated and included references to contemporary and historical treatises on Irish history, linguistic theories, Persian mythology and classical traditions. Beaufort advanced the then-prevalent theories of Ireland’s oriental origins, influenced by the work of antiquarians such as Charles Vallancey. Building on connections between epic histories and linguistic similarities as evidence for this shared heritage, Beaufort interpreted ancient monuments as material evidence of the Phoenician origins of Ireland’s civilisation. The essay earned her some standing among antiquarians, and she corresponded with Thomas Crofton Croker and Cork antiquarian John Windele. She was also named a member of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society in 1851.
Though her essay in the RIA’s Transactions is her only signed publication, several anonymously published works have been attributed to Beaufort. She authored Dialogues on entomology, in which the forms and habits of insects are familiarly explained (1819), which explored the world of insects in the form of a dialogue between a mother and her daughter and was intended for the instruction of children between the age of eight and ten. Dedicated to Maria Edgeworth, it contains several detailed drawings, some coloured, of insects. It is also likely that Beaufort was the author of Animal sagacity: exemplified by facts: showing the force of instinct in beasts, birds, &c. (1819), which was published in Dublin by the Kildare Place Society. It was likewise intended for the education of young minds, again through a dialogic form of instruction. It is also likely that she collaborated with her sister Henrietta on the anonymously published The heiress in her minority; or, the progress of character (1850), as the content of the book strongly resembles elements from Beaufort’s 1842–3 travel journal.
Aside from her antiquarian and entomological work, Beaufort also produced architectural drawings and watercolour paintings that show her to have been an accomplished draughtswoman and watercolourist. A sketch book created between 1844 and 1850, held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI), contains numerous drawings signed ‘LLDB’ (Lady Louisa de Beaufort). The drawings feature figures from various regions, such as Spain, India, Algeria and Italy, and from various walks of life, such as soldiers, travellers, beggars and nurses. Other drawings depict Irish scenes, grounded in Beaufort’s own travels and her familiarity with country life, including images from her visit to Edgeworthstown and a watercolour of Maria Edgeworth. She also gifted a bound journal of sketches to her brother, Sir Francis Beaufort, in 1857. These ‘Irish scraps to amuse my dear admiral’ contain watercolour sketches and sepia drawings of rural life and landscapes made during a tour of the south and west of Ireland (TCD, MS 8269). Other artistic ventures led her to design the stained-glass east window of St Columba’s church in Collon, which is still in place today.
Beaufort never married. After the death of her father in 1821, the family’s financial position deteriorated, and she and her sister Henrietta were largely dependent on relatives and friends. She was in receipt of an annual civil list pension of £81 19s. 0d. from 1822, which provided support and a measure of independence. She spent most of her life living in Ireland with Henrietta, except for a period in London between 1834 and 1838, when they both helped manage the household of their brother Francis following the death of his first wife. Much of her later life was spent in Dublin, where she lived with Henrietta at 9 Hatch Street, until her death on 6 February 1863.
At a time when women’s intellectual contributions were rarely publicly disseminated, Beaufort was among the first in Ireland to publish in her own name and to contribute original antiquarian research. Her essay precedes George Petrie’s better-known 1845 essay on pre-Norman ecclesiastical architecture, though her work was not picked up in subsequent discussions of the subject as her theories were later superseded. So too have her other publications disappeared from notice or, in their anonymity, been wrongly attributed to more established women intellectuals such as Jane Marcet. As scholarly attention continues to recover obscured and forgotten women writers, Beaufort’s work adds to our understanding of the cultural, intellectual and social world of the Protestant gentry in nineteenth-century Ireland.
Beaufort’s papers were dispersed after her death, with correspondence, diaries and sketchbooks held in the RIA, the NLI, TCD and the Huntington Library.