Louisa Stuart Costello

Sussex, 1799 - 1870, Boulogne

BiographyLC name authority rec. n.n 87833308
LC heading: Costello, Louisa Stuart, 1799-1870
Biography:
Costello, Louisa Stuart (1799–1870), miniature painter and author, was born in Sussex, the daughter of Captain James Francis Costello (d. 1814/15) of the 14th foot, a native of co. Mayo, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Tothridge (d. 1846). She was the only surviving sibling of the journalist and illustrator Dudley Costello (1803–1865); another brother appears to have died at sea in 1813. After the death of her father Louisa went to Paris with her mother. There she helped to support the family by painting miniatures, reportedly funding her brother's education at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and assisting him financially until his death. About 1820 Costello moved to London, where she continued to paint miniatures, some of which she exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1822 and 1839. Two extant watercolour portraits, of Mlle Sontag (1830; Victoria and Albert Museum) and Queen Victoria (1837; Royal Collection), are executed in a delicate, fashionable style reminiscent of the work of A. E. Chalon. In the 1820s Costello lived at addresses in Brompton, London, and Hammersmith, Middlesex, and by 1833 had moved to Brighton; she also seems to have frequently visited the continent, particularly France, during the 1820s and 1830s. Many of these trips may have been connected with her work as a copyist of illuminated manuscripts in both London and Paris; some examples are held in the British Museum.

From an early age Costello had pursued a parallel career as an author. Two books of poetry, published in 1815 and 1819, were followed in 1825 by a third, Songs of a Stranger, some of which were set to music and became popular. In 1835 she published Specimens of the Early Poetry of France, lyrical if rather fussy translations of a wide range of medieval French poets. This work made her literary reputation and attracted the attention of Thomas Moore, to whom it was dedicated, and Walter Scott. The rose garden of Persia (1845), highly ornamented with decorative borders deriving from original manuscripts held by the Asiatic Society, offered similar renditions of famous Persian poets. Although Costello worked from prose translations rather than the original works her interpretations were satisfactory; her paraphrases of sections of the Quatrains of ‘Umar Khayyam, for instance, compare creditably with the celebrated translation by Edward Fitzgerald.

Costello also published several novels, including The Queen's Poisoner, or, France in the Sixteenth Century (1841), a ponderous historical novel, and Clara Fane, or The Contrasts of a Life (1848), a curious mélange of romantic melodrama, domestic realism, farce, fantasy, and travel journal. Both novels suggest that she had no great talent for fiction, and both her historical biographies and her travel books are far more readable. Her biographies of royal and noble women—which clearly traded on the popularity of similar works by Lucy Aikin, the Strickland sisters, and Mary Anne Everett Green—were creditable examples of this literary genre and generally involved some original research. The four-volume Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen (1844)—which included biographies of Bess of Hardwick, Arabella Stuart, Anne Clifford, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Lady Rachel Russell, Mary Beale, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Susannah Centlivre—seems to have been researched mainly among the books and papers in the duke of Devonshire's library at Chatsworth. Some archival work was undertaken in public and private libraries in Brittany for her Memoirs of Anne, Duchess of Brittany (1855), the first full-length biography in English of that Renaissance French queen.

By far the most appealing of Costello's publications are her accounts of tours in Britain and on the continent, such as A Summer amongst the Bocages and the Vines (2 vols., 1840) and Falls, Lakes and Mountains of North Wales (1845). Well illustrated and lively they ‘combine graphic description with that kind of anecdotical archaeology which varies the narrative of travel and adventure’ (The Athenaeum). Summer, for instance, mingles chatty accounts of local legends and antiquities with passionate outbursts on the deficiencies of French inns and the beauty of the Breton people. Costello also contributed essays and stories to periodicals, principally Bentley's Miscellany and Household Words, for both of which her brother Dudley also wrote. In 1843 Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggested to R. H. Horne that his New Spirit of the Age should include Costello, whom she described as highly accomplished.

Costello's publications won her a modest place in London society as a literary figure, and several friends of rank, including the family of the radical politician Sir Francis Burdett, who later supplemented her scanty literary earnings with a pension. She was also assisted by the grant of a civil-list annuity of £75 on 9 August 1852. Despite her ‘pale pretty face and engaging conversation’ (The Athenaeum) she never married, possibly because of her close-knit family relationships; one biographer comments acidly that ‘Miss Costello's life was a long history of devotion to her mother and brother, neither of whom seems to have been particularly grateful’ (Kunitz and Haycraft, 151). After the deaths of her mother (in 1846) and her brother (in 1865), she retired to Boulogne, a favourite haunt for impoverished but genteel English society. She died there, of cancer of the mouth, on 24 April 1870 at 20 rue Charles Butor; she was buried in the cemetery of St Martin. The last entry in her diary read ‘Oblivion all’.

Rosemary Mitchell
Sources The Athenaeum (7 May 1870), 612 · W. G. Strickland, A dictionary of Irish artists, 2 vols. (1913); repr. with introduction by T. J. Snoddy (1989) · A. Lohrli, ed., Household Words: a weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens (1973), 241–2 · Graves, RA exhibitors · D. Foskett, Miniatures: dictionary and guide (1987) · S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds., British authors of the nineteenth century (1936) · G. Meissner, ed., Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, [new edn, 34 vols.] (Leipzig and Munich, 1983–) · Blain, Clements & Grundy, Feminist comp. · L. Lambourne and J. Hamilton, eds., British watercolours in the Victoria and Albert Museum (1980), 83 · D. Millar, The Victorian watercolours and drawings in the collection of her majesty the queen, 1 (1995), 238 · Wellesley index · R. Welch, ed., The Oxford companion to Irish literature (1996) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1870)
Archives BL, business papers and corresp. with Richard Bentley's firm, Add. MSS 46613–46615, 46650, 46652, passim
Wealth at death under £600: probate, 13 June 1870, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Costello, Louisa Stuart (1799–1870)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/6380, accessed 5 Oct 2015]

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