Louisa Stuart

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Lady Louisa Stuart at the age of 93 painted by George Hayter (1851)
Lady Louisa's father, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute
William Medows
Stuarts family home in Luton Hoo

Lady Louisa Stuart ( August 12, 1757 - August 4, 1851 in London ) was a British writer .

Life

Louisa Stuart was the youngest of eleven children - six daughters and five sons - of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713–1792), who at the time of her birth was one of the closest friends of the future King George III. was. Her mother was Mary , a daughter of the writer Mary Wortley Montagu . Bute was indeed Scot, but spent most of his time in his townhouse in London on Berkeley Square . In 1762 he bought a mansion in Luton Hoo , Bedfordshire . Bute was Prime Minister from 1762 to 1763, but had to resign after severe criticism, from then on he lived on his family seat and devoted himself primarily to botany .

At the age of ten, Louisa Stuart began to follow in the footsteps of her literary grandmother. She feared her siblings, who would make fun of her for her erudition. Although she later attended social events in London with her mother, she also closely followed current literature events and corresponded with friends. She had a great power of observation from childhood, and she recorded her observations in notebooks that have been preserved.

When Lady Louisa was 13 years old, she fell in love with her great cousin William Medows (1738-1813), who was 41 years old at the time. Louisa's father found this connection inappropriate and ended it. Louisa Stuart was deeply disappointed. Later that year, Medows married another woman.

Obviously Louisa Stuart never fell in love afterwards, but she had at least two admirers, Henry Dundas (1742-1811) and John Charles Villiers (1757-1838). Villiers overwhelmed Louisa Stuart with his admiration, and her family would have liked to see her married him, but she decided that "a love affair without love is nothing but a bad business" and remained unmarried for life.

Later there were apparently false rumors that Louisa was in love with the much older widower William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford . In the 1790s she became friends with Walter Scott , who regularly sent her his manuscripts and asked her for her opinion, which he valued. This friendship lasted until Scott's death in 1832.

Louisa Stuart was not considered pretty, but Fanny Burney wrote of her in 1786: “In part, Lady Louisa Stuart is very much like her mother, but with a demeanor and demeanor that is infinitely more pleasant; Although it is far from being beautiful, it proves that the union of understanding and vitality can occasionally take the place of a lack of beauty. "

Louisa Stuart was her mother's companion on social occasions for 20 years. After her death in 1794, she bought a house in Marylebone , London, from which she could walk in Regent's Park . At home she sat over her books and led a more reclusive life, but was also occasionally sociable. She destroyed many of her manuscripts, but continued to write many letters, hold conversations, and visit mansions. A few months before her death, it was painted by George Hayter . She died in her London home a few days before her 94th birthday. She outlived all of her siblings, the last sister by around 30 years.

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Fearing damaging her reputation as a lady of society, Louisa Stuart did not want her written works to appear under her name, and in fact they did not appear until 1895, over 40 years after her death. John Gibson Lockhart's book Life of Sir Walter Scott from 1837/38 contains several letters from Scott to Louisa Stuart. In a letter to his publisher, Scott wrote: "I hope you have received the printed pages from Lady Louisa Stuart, but at the cost of your life do not mention her name."

Much of what Stuart wrote is still only in the form of unpublished memoirs and letters, most of them addressed to women, but interest in her as a contemporary witness grew towards the end of the 19th century. From 1895 to 1898, Mrs. Godfrey Clark edited three volumes of Stuart's writings, Gleanings from an Old Portfolio (Correspondence of Lady Louisa Stuart), and in 1899 was followed by Lady Louisa Stuart: Selections from her Manuscripts , edited by James A. Home. In 1901 and 1903 two volumes of Letters from Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton were published in Edinburgh .

In 1827 Louisa Stuarts wrote the life story of Lady Mary Coke , wife of Edward Coke, Viscount Coke . She described Lady Mary as a virtuous woman who suffered from a brutal husband, but also as a tragic figure with paranoia. Her essay Biographical Anecdotes of Lady MW Montagu (published anonymously in the 1837 edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagus Letters and Works ) dealt mainly with the political work of Lady Mary's husband Edward Wortley Montagu in order to express her own views on the politicians of the time Montagu, Robert Walpole , Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer , George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax , to expound the Whigs and the Tories and to show their loyalty to the Tories. Inspired by the poetry of Scott, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson , Louisa Stuart also wrote poems, fables and ballads.

Louisa Stuart was not a “ blue stocking ”, and although their works also have touches of malicious humor, there was no mutual affection. As a well-behaved lady, she harbored silent contempt for Elizabeth Montagu's practice of introducing into society people who were born outside of the higher circles. She also made fun of “university geniuses who have nothing but a book in their pocket”. She wrote: “The only Bluestock meetings I have ever attended were those of Mrs. Walsingham and Mrs. Montagu. Visiting the latter, however, was like drawing from a spring [...]. "

Professor Karl Miller acknowledges Louisa Stuart's work in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as “great,” but also addresses its contradictions. She was both for and against female emancipation, and while on the one hand she preferred the old social order and had an aversion to the common people, on the other hand she admired "simple human worth". Miller speaks of Stuart as "the least known, but, without a doubt, one of the fine writers of her time." Literary scholar Jill Rubinstein describes her as "Tory to the bone who never forgot the pain caused by defamatory personalities." Attacks by Wilkes and others on her father ”and compares her political stance with that of Walter Scott:“ A principled and consistent conservatism. ”

Fonts

  • Biographical anecdotes . Printed anonymously. In: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 's Letters and Works
  • Gleanings from an Old Portfolio. Correspondence of Lady Louisa Stuart. Edited by Mrs. Godfrey Clark. 3 volumes, private print. 1895-1898
  • Lady Louisa Stuart: Selections from her Manuscripts . Edited by the Hon. James A. Home. New York & London. Harper Brothers 1899
  • Letters from Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton . Edited by the Hon. James A. Home. Edinburgh. D. Douglas. 2 volumes. 1901 and 1903
  • The Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart, selected and with an Introduction by R. Brimley Johnson . London. John Lane The Bodley Head. 1926

literature

  • Harry Graham: Lady Louisa Stuart (1757-1851) . Chapter 28 of A Group of Scottish Women . New York. Duffield & Co. 1908
  • Susan Buchan: Lady Louisa Stuart: Her Memories and Portraits . London. Hodder & Stoughton 1932
  • Karl Miller: Authors . Clarendon Press 1989. ISBN 978-0-19-811780-3
  • Karl Miller: "Stuart, Lady Louisa (1757-1851)": In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Online edition 2006

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Harry Graham / Jocelyn Henry C. Graham: A Group of Scottish Women . New York. Duffield & Co. 1908. Chapter 28
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Karl Miller: “Stuart, Lady Louisa (1757-1851), writer”. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, September 2004 and January 2006
  3. ↑ Fanny Burney: The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay . Edited by Charlott Barrett. 1842. Volume 3. p. 237: "Lady Louisa Stuart has parts equal to those of her mother, with a deportment and appearance infinitely more pleasing: yet she is far from handsome, but proves how well beauty may be occasionally missed when understanding and vivacity unite to fill up her place. "
  4. ^ A b The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21) Volume 11: The Period of the French Revolution XV The Bluestockings, §3 Mrs Montagu on bartleby.com
  5. ↑ John Gibson Lockhart: Life of Scott (1837-1838)
  6. ^ WM Parker: "The Origin of Scott's Nigel". In: The Modern Language Review . Volume 34, No. 4 October 1939. pp. 535-540
  7. ↑ a b Looser, op. Cit. , P. 60
  8. ↑ Devoney Looser: British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 . JHU Press 2000. ISBN 0-8018-7905-1 . P. 64
  9. ^ Gleanings from an Old Portfolio (Correspondence of Lady Louisa Stuart) . Edited by Mrs. Godfrey Clark. Private print 1898. Volume 3. P. 61: “The only blue stocking meetings which I myself ever attended were those at Mrs Walsingham's and Mrs Montagu's. To frequent the latter, however, was to drink at the fountain-head [...]. "
  10. ↑ Looser, op. Cit. , Footnote 13, p. 215: "" Tory to the bone, never having forgiven the pain inflicted on her father by the scurrilous personal attacks of Wilkes and others "and compares her politics to those of Sir Walter Scott , 'a principled and consistent conservatism '. "
  11. ↑ Looser, op.cit , p. 64
  12. ^ Joanne Shattock: The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature . Volume 4. 1999. ISBN 0-521-39100-8 . Pp. 1035-1036
personal data
SURNAME Stuart, Louisa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1757
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1851
Place of death London