Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
| Marguerite, Countess of Blessington | |
|---|---|
Painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1822
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| Born | Margaret Power 1 September 1789 Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland |
| Died | 4 June 1849 (aged 59) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Novelist, miscellaneous writer |
| Notable works | Conversations with Lord Byron (1834) |
| Spouse | Cpt. Maurice St. Leger Farmer (m. 1804–1817; his death) Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington (m. 1818–1829; his death) |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1 September 1789 – 4 June 1849) was an Irish novelist, journalist, and literary hostess. She became acquainted with Lord Byron in Genoa and wrote a book about him.
Born Margaret Power near Clonmel in County Tipperary, Ireland, she was a daughter of Edmund Power and Ellen Sheehy, small landowners. She was "haphazardly educated by her own reading and by her mother's friend Ann Dwyer." Her childhood was made unhappy by her father's character and poverty, and her early womanhood wretched by a compulsory marriage at the age of fifteen to Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer, an English officer whose drunken habits finally brought him as a debtor to the King's Bench Prison, where he died by falling out of a window in October 1817. She left him after three months.
Marguerite later moved to Hampshire to live for five years with the family of Thomas Jenkins, a sympathetic and literary sea captain. Jenkins introduced her to the Irishman Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington, a widower with four children (two legitimate), seven years her senior. They married at St Mary's, Bryanston Square, Marylebone, on 16 February 1818, only four months after her first husband's death.
Of rare beauty, charm and wit, she was no less distinguished for her generosity and for the extravagant tastes she shared with her second husband, which resulted in encumbering his estates with debt. On 25 August 1822 they set out for a continental tour with Marguerite's youngest sister, the 21-year-old Mary Anne, and servants. On the way they met Count D'Orsay (who had first become an intimate of Lady Blessington in London in 1821) in Avignon on 20 November 1822, before settling at Genoa for four months from 31 March 1823. There they met Byron on several occasions, giving Lady Blessington material for her Conversations with Lord Byron.
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