Author: Gardiner, Marguerite
Biography:
GARDINER, Marguerite, formerly FARMER, formerly POWER (1789-1849: ODNB)
Marguerite Gardiner was born Margaret Power on 1 Sept. 1789 at Knockbrit, co. Tipperary, Ireland, one of six children of Catholic landowners, Ellen (Sheehy) and Edmund Power. She had a very limited education but did learn to read. On 7 Mar. 1804, aged fourteen, she was married against her will to Maurice St. Leger Farmer, a violent man whom she left after three months. From about 1809 she lived with another officer, Thomas Jenkins, in Hampshire, but by 1816 he had surrendered her to Charles John Gardiner (1782-1829), a wealthy Irish earl who was a widower with four children. After the death of her husband in Oct. 1817 she was free to marry Gardiner, as she did on 16 Feb. 1818 in Marylebone, London. At that point she became no longer Margaret Farmer but Marguerite, Countess of Blessington. She launched her writing career in 1822 with two anonymous prose works based on her travels. At their house in St. James’s Square the Blessingtons entertained writers, artists, politicians, and foreign visitors such as the French count Alfred d’Orsay (1801-52), who married the earl’s daughter Harriet at the British Embassy in Naples on 4 Dec. 1827; she left him in 1831. The earl died suddenly of a stroke in Paris on 25 May 1829, leaving the countess with debts and a much reduced income. She however returned to London, resumed her brilliant salons, and started working tirelessly as a writer, chiefly of novels (12) and books of travels and memoirs (notably Conversations with Lord Byron, 1834), but also as a contributor to periodicals and annuals. (The long poem in this bibliography might not be hers; see the book record.) In 1849 she was bankrupt and she moved to Paris to escape her creditors. D’Orsay had arrived there two weeks earlier—their continued association with one another having been for some time a source of scandalous but probably unjust rumours—and was there when she died of heart disease in rented rooms two months later, on 4 June. He arranged for her burial in a mausoleum at Chambourcy with space for himself later; the inscriptions in English and Latin are by Barry Cornwall (B. W. Procter) and Walter Savage Landor (qq.v.) (ODNB 3 Apr. 2024; DIB 3 Apr. 2024; findmypast.com 3 Apr. 2024; Orlando; The News [London] 24 Dec. 1827)
Other Names:
- Countess of Blessington