Background
Georgiana Charlotte Leveson-Gower was the daughter of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Granville and his wife Lady Harriet Cavendish, and a sister of Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, a prominent statesman.
Georgiana Charlotte Leveson-Gower was the daughter of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Granville and his wife Lady Harriet Cavendish, and a sister of Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, a prominent statesman.
She wrote several novels, some of which were very successful. They include Ellen Middleton (1844), Grantley Manor (1847), Lady Bird (1852), of Street.Francis of Rome (1855), The Countess of Bonneval (1858), Rose Leblanc (1861), Laurentia, a Tale of Japan (1861), Too Strange Not to Be True (1864), Constance Sherwood (1865), A Stormy (1867), Helpers of the Holy Soul (1868), Mistress Gerald"s Niece (1869), of Louisa de Carvajal (1873), A Will and a Way (1881), and of Elizabeth Lady Falkland (1883).
She also published two volumes of verse.
She founded Saint Walburga"s School, in Bournemouth, which survives, albeit on a new site, and a Blue Plaque to commemorate her Catholic activities can be found on the Sacred Heart church in Bournemouth. In a margin note in his copy of Ellen Middleton, Edgar Allan Poe wrote: A remarkable work, and one which I find much difficulty in admitting to be the composition of a woman.
Not that many good and glorious things have not been the composition of women — but, because, here, the severe precision of style, the thoroughness, and the luminousness, are points never observable, in even the most admirable of their writings.
