Author: Costello, Louisa Stuart
Biography:
COSTELLO, Louisa Stuart (1799-1870: ODNB)
She was baptised on 2 Dec. 1799 at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Westminster, London, the daughter of Captain James Francis Costello of the 14th Regiment of Foot and Elizabeth Tothridge, who later married on 12 June 1805 at St. Marylebone, Westminster. Her father is thought to have died in 1814 or 1815 and some commentators have assumed he died in the Napoleonic Wars; a less heroic account of him as having sold his commission, leaving his widow “destitute,” was given by a Mrs. Bowdich who applied to the RLF in 1828 on Louisa’s behalf. In any event, after his death, she went to Paris with her mother and helped support the family by painting miniatures, with some of the income going to finance her brother Dudley Costello (1803-65) at Sandhurst. Around 1820 they returned to London, living in Brompton and Hammersmith, and she exhibited at the Royal Academy (1822-26). In 1828 she was awarded £15 by the RLF. The family moved to Brighton around 1833 and she appears to have visited Boulogne regularly. After her mother’s death in 1846, she went to live with her brother Dudley and his family at 54 Acacia Road, Marylebone, and is recorded there in the 1851 Census. The following year she was awarded a Civil List pension of £75 p.a. After her brother’s death in 1865, she appears to have gone to Boulogne where she died on 24 Apr. 1870 and was buried at St. Martin, with only the journalist and editor William Henry Wills in attendance. She left an estate of under £600 with Wills as her executor. In addition to the three books of poetry listed here, she compiled two collections of French and Persian poetry: Specimens of the Early Poetry of France (1835) and The Rose Garden of Persia (1845). Her novels The Queen’s Poisoner(1841) and Clara Fane (1848) have no great merit and her biographies of royal and noble women were ordinary efforts in an overworked field. Her travel writing has fared better with A Summer among the Bocages and the Vines (1840) and Falls, Lakes and Mountains of North Wales (1845) still worth reading. (ODNB [sister and brother] 1 Nov. 2022; Orlando; RLF, 1/ 619; Clare Broome Saunders, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life[2015]; Bell’s Weekly Messenger 30 Apr. 1870; [William Henry Wills,] Obituary, Athenaeum 7 May 1870, 612) AA
Other Names:
- Louisa S. Costello