Louisa Stuart Costello

A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137340122
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870) was a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, travel writer, historian, and artist. Here, Broom Saunders provides a wealth of extracts from her diverse writings, a rich source of information about the pioneering career of a professional woman writer, and insight into a nineteenth-century writing life.

C H A P T E R 1

LOUISA STUART COSTELLO’S LIFE

EARLY YEARS

Costello was born on October 9, 1799, to James Francis Costello, a captain in the 14th Regiment, and Elizabeth Tothridge. There is still some debate about the issue of Costello’s place of birth. Rosemary Mitchell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) identifies it as Sussex, while Costello’s death certificate says she was “présumée née” in Paris.¹ While Costello is often identified as an Irish poet, and suggested to have been born in County Mayo, Ireland, where her father was born, there is no evidence to suggest that she actually ever visited Ireland, and Costello certainly identifies herself as an English writer.² The 1851 census records her place of birth as “Middlesex, London,” which seems the most reliable source. By 1803, when her younger brother, Dudley, was born, the family were living in Sussex. Little is known of Costello’s elder brother, whose death at sea on HMS Tweed (1807), in 1813, she commemorates in two poignant poems.³ It is likely that Elizabeth Tothridge Costello is the author of an accomplished novel, The Soldier’s Orphan (1809): the novel’s focus on the importance of an equal education for both sexes owes much to Wollstonecraft’s theories and explains, in part, her daughter’s astonishing breadth of knowledge.⁴ James Francis Costello had a somewhat checkered army career, rising to the rank of captain in 1795. His death in 1814, said to be during the Napoleonic Wars, is shrouded in mystery as his name does not appear on the British army lists after 1811, suggesting he was certainly not in service after this date.⁵ Whatever the circumstances of his demise, he certainly left his family in considerable financial difficulties, and they moved to a cheaper life in an occupied Paris. Here Costello’s literary and artistic life began when she copied illuminated medieval manuscripts from the Bibliothèque Royale for the British Museum, illustrations which she would later reproduce for Specimens of the Early Poetry of France from the Time of the Troubadours and Trouvères to the Reign of Henri Quatre (Specimens; 1835).⁶

Costello’s first volume of poetry, The Maid of the Cyprus Isle, and Other Poems (Maid; 1815), ran into two editions. On the surface, Costello’s volume is a typical example of a young woman’s reflections on romance, loss, and nature, but the conventional framing of Maid is used to disguise three thought-provoking poems that address the contemporary political situation and the Napoleonic Wars. Even the title poem disturbs expectations: beneath the mask of a fictional medieval setting, “The Maid of the Cyprus Isle” unravels a tale of betrayal and seduction, and criticizes war’s cost and the empty triumph of battle glory.

The title poem of Costello’s second volume of poetry Redwald; A Tale of Mona: and Other Poems (Redwald; 1819) is a Gothic tale of love, treachery, murder, and revenge. Among the miscellaneous poems published with it are translations and dramatic monologues, which show Costello’s experiments with the commercially successful genres and poetic forms of the time. Redwald brought Costello to critical attention for the first time: a largely ambivalent review in the London Magazine is clearly attracted by the youth, melancholy, and “genuine talent” of the “accomplished girl” author.⁷

Her brother Dudley’s enrollment in the Military College at Sandhurst brought Costello and her mother back to London, where, from this early stage in her career, Costello demonstrated an aptitude for business and an understanding of the workings of the commercial literary world. Costello wrote to Rev. William Lisle Bowles, Vicar of Bremhill and chaplain to the Prince Regent, praising his Fourteen Sonnets and enclosing a specimen of her own writing. She was rewarded with his lifelong patronage and introductions to leading figures in his circle, such as Sir Francis Burdett, Thomas Moore, and Maria Edgeworth. Costello’s association with the reforming member of Parliament, Sir Francis Burdett, fifth Baronet, was particularly influential on her life and career. She became friends with his wife, Lady Sophie Burdett, and their five children, including the celebrated philanthropist Angela, to whom she later dedicated Béarn and the Pyrenees: A Legendary Tour of the Country of Henri Quatre (Béarn; 1844). The pension Francis Burdett bestowed on Costello continued after his death in 1844. In July 1845, Costello wrote an affectionate tribute to her recently deceased patron:

The friends and neighbours of the late beloved proprietor of Foremark, the celebrated Sir Francis Burdett, may now look sadly on the more than ever deserted hall of his ancestors, which stands on the pleasant banks of Trent . . . A magnificent avenue of venerable trees was his favourite retreat, where he often sat reading, or walked with one of those daughters to whom he was so tenderly attached, and he delighted in the beautiful rides in the vicinity of his park. His presence was always a happiness and a holiday to all his tenants: his kind heart, and noble generous feeling, being shown in every action of his life; but the delicate health of Lady Burdett prevented his visiting his Derbyshire property as often as his inclination would have led him to do. The pretty flower-garden, and the magnificent pinery, alone are left, as relics of the taste of one of the most amiable, gentle, refined, and benevolent of women, who bore a life of suffering with unexampled meekness, and whose loss, after a union of fifty years, broke the heart of her devoted husband. The deaths little more than a twelvemonth since, of Sir Francis and his lady within eleven days of each other, cannot but be remembered by most readers—too freshly, alas! by all those friends who had the happiness of knowing them intimately.⁸

Even toward the end of her life, Costello was still corresponding with Angela Burdett-Coutts: a Christmas card sent from Torquay on New Years Eve of 1863, “With Miss Burdett Coutts best wishes for 1864,” was inserted into Costello’s Album.⁹

Thomas Moore’s journals show his changing views of Costello’s work and Bowles’s efforts on her behalf. The entry for December 25, 1818, records Moore reading his wife Bessy an opera by Miss Costello, “a protegée of Bowles’s,” and his response that the work she had sent him “cannot possibly do; which is a sad pity, as she is a respectable girl, and, with her mother, much distressed.”¹⁰ The following day Moore writes, “Bowles called upon me to enforce my dining with him, and to ask my opinion of Miss Costello’s opera; was sorry to be obliged to tell him how hopeless I thought it; showed me a letter which he had written to her, begging her acceptance of 20 L.”¹¹ Five months later, May 29, 1819, Moore’s view of “the young authoress that Bowles patronises” is that she is “rather a nice girl,” helped perhaps by the “very flattering letter, ‘first poet of the age,’ &c.&c.” she had enclosed with some poems.¹² Evidence of the strong friendship that exists between the Costello family and Moore can be found when Dudley Costello delights Moore, in April 1834, with a beautiful present of a cup formed out of a calabash nut that he had brought from his commission in Bermuda.¹³ On August 12 of the same year he is delighted by Costello’s request for permission to dedicate Specimens to him and a letter of June 13, 1842, shows Moore offering to write to Longmans on her behalf that he “shall take care to urge your suit with them, and try to soften their booksellers hearts.”¹⁴ By 1845 Costello is his “clever friend” whose “To the Poet,” published in the Morning Chronicle in January, urges Moore to return to writing—“Bid the minstrel awaken, and charm us”—and clearly delights him so much that he transcribes it in full.¹⁵

A letter from George Crabbe to Costello in 1819 shows that Costello had used Bowles’s influence to gain an introduction to the poet and to ask his assistance. Crabbe writes,

I have been too much employed about my business with Mr Murray (forgive my selfishness) to pay the requisite attention to your poems and I would not hurry them over, but I hope shortly to be more at liberty and that whatever occurs to me that may be of any service I will very faithfully communicate. In the meantime you will allow me to enclose the subscription I mentioned to Mr Bowles and for which I had his assurance that you would not be offended with me. So remember and do credit to your friend’s assurance. I shall call for my copies when I want them, at present, between his indulgence and yours I have all need.

Have the goodness, my dear young lady, to favour me with a line by the 2nd post that I may know my apology has reached you and be assured that I will not forget to pay all attention in my power to the verses which I shall have the pleasure of reading.¹⁶

Writing to ask assistance of Sir Walter Scott in 1823, Costello complains, “I find how impossible it is to succeed in any undertaking—especially for a woman to do so—unless some powerful friend would ‘lend a pitying hand to help her.’”¹⁷ Costello clearly recognized the difficulties of her position as a “dependent professional”¹⁸ writer and used personal contacts and the influence of friends to help get her works published.

Costello showed her appreciation of Bowles’s crucial support and patronage in the dedication of her next poetry volume, Songs of a Stranger (Songs; 1825), “as a tribute of gratitude and sincere esteem”; and further in the poem “Lines-written in November at Bremhill, Wiltshire, the residence of the Rev. W. L. Bowles” [5o].¹⁹ Songs, a collection of 82 short poems, including love lyrics, historical poems, Italian translations, and occasional verse [5m] [5n], was published to wide critical acclaim and established Costello’s reputation as a poet.

Many of the poems in the volume had already appeared as contributions to the Literary Gazette in 1823, under the pseudo initials of “M. E.,” and alongside works by “L. E. L.”. By presenting herself as these initials, Costello participates in the “commodification of personae crafted by women writers including L. E. L.”²⁰ By 1845, Moore recognizes the initials of his “clever friend” when he sees “L. S. C.” as the signature to “To the Poet” in the Morning Chronicle,²¹ suggesting that by then Costello’s fame as a travel writer meant that she would be recognized for her own initials and that they had an authority and commercial value of their own. Felicia Hemans had also used the signature of her initials “F. H.” for her poetry until 1830, when an imitator, trying to profit from her popularity, also started writing with initials “F. H.” Hemans proceeds by asking Blackwood to ensure that her future poems should be published “with my name at full length in the table of contents, and without any signature.”²² Hemans famously adopted a commercially successful literary persona of “Mrs. Hemans,” the use of her title claiming “new authority for her patriotic yet acceptably feminine work” and disguising a troubled domestic life as an abandoned wife and single parent.²³

Costello was also engaging here in the common contemporary pursuit of recycling poems, testing them out on the periodical audience before introducing them to a different audience in volume form, and crucially repeating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Louisa Stuart Costello’s Life
• 2 Louisa Stuart Costello’s Translations and Medievalism
• 3 Louisa Stuart Costello and Arthurian Legend
• 4 Louisa Stuart Costello and Nineteenth-Century Journalism
• 5 Louisa Stuart Costello and Poetry
• 6 Louisa Stuart Costello and Travel Writing
• 7 Louisa Stuart Costello, History, and Historical Biography
• 8 Louisa Stuart Costello and Novels
• Conclusion Obituary of Louisa Stuart Costello by W. H. Wills
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index