Lady Georgiana Fullerton (; 23 September 1812 – 19 January 1885) was an English novelist, philanthropist, biographer, and school founder. She was born into a noble political family. She was one of the foremost Roman Catholic novelists writing in England during the nineteenth century.
Biography
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, born as Lady Georgiana Charlotte Leveson-Gower, was born at home in
Tixall Hall,
Staffordshire, England. She was the second daughter of
Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Earl of Granville, and
Lady Harriet Elizabeth Cavendish. She was baptized in the
Anglican faith on 10 October 1812, in Tixall Hall, where her family was staying at the time.
For many of her younger years, she resided in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
, where her father served as the English ambassador.
[Warren, Kate Mary. "Lady Georgiana Charlotte Fullerton." The Catholic Encyclopedia]
Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 4 June 2019 While there she had occasion to take piano lessons from a young
Franz Liszt.
Marriage and conversion
On 13 July 1833 Georgiana married embassy attaché Alexander George Fullerton, in Paris. She and her husband left Paris 8 years later, when her father retired from the embassy. They lived in
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
for a few years, where her husband converted to
Roman Catholicism. She followed in his footsteps and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on
Passion Sunday
Passion Sunday is the fifth Sunday of Lent, marking the beginning of Passiontide. In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church removed Passiontide from the liturgical year of the Novus Ordo, but it is still observed in the Extraordinary Form, the Persona ...
, 29 March 1846 in London.
[
In London she joined Margaret Radclyffe Livingstone Eyre and ]Cecil Chetwynd Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian
Cecil Chetwynd Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian (née Lady Cecil Chetwynd-Talbot; 17 April 1808 – 13 May 1877) was a British noblewoman and philanthropist who founded the Anglican Saint John's Church in Jedburgh and the Roman Catholic Saint David ...
who, like her, were recent aristocratic converts to Catholicism. The three of them were a known source of Catholic philanthropy.
In 1855, her only son died at the age of 21,[ overwhelming her with grief and throwing her and her husband into a permanent state of mourning. After the loss of her only son, she devoted herself to works of philanthropy and charity. In 1856, she adopted the ]Franciscan
, image = FrancescoCoA PioM.svg
, image_size = 200px
, caption = A cross, Christ's arm and Saint Francis's arm, a universal symbol of the Franciscans
, abbreviation = OFM
, predecessor =
, ...
tradition by enrolling herself in the third order of St. Francis. A the time of the 1861 England Census, she, her husband, and eleven servants lived at 27 Chapel St in the fashionable St. George Hanover Square, Mayfair, London.
Charitable work
The Fullerton residence in Sussex was the center of her charitable works, which include her efforts to bring the sisters of St. Vincent of Paul to England. In 1872, she assisted in the founding of Frances Margaret Taylor
Frances Margaret Taylor, whose religious name was Mother Magdalen of the Sacred Heart (20 January 1832 – 9 June 1900) was an English nurse, editor and writer, nun, and Superior General and founder of the Roman Catholic religious congregation th ...
's school and religious community Poor Servants of the Mother of God Incarnate in which she served as the benefactor.
Death
Three years later, she moved for the final time with her husband and eight servants to Bournemouth, into their home called Ayrfield, Gervis Road in which she died on 19 January 1885. Her remains are in the Cemetery of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton. Following her death, Madame, Augustus Craven (née La Ferronays) published a work titled ''Lady Georgiana Fullerton, sa Vie et ses Œuvres'', documenting Fullerton's philanthropic work.
Publications
Lady Georgiana Fullerton published roughly a dozen novels and biographies on religious, historical, and romantic themes between the years 1844–1883. Most of her publications were novels, but she did publish two volumes of verse. Occasionally, Fullerton translated the works of other authors, such as ''The Notary's Daughter, a Tale from the French of Madame Léonie d'Aulney'' (1878).
She began her writing career when she was 32, publishing her first novel, ''Ellen Middleton: A Tale'' in three volume in July 1844.[ Her own brother, Lord Brougham, and Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville, commended her work. The novel contained no illustrations, which was unusual for the period.
She published her second novel, ''Grantley Manor'', in 1847, following her conversion to Catholicism. This novel contained a more advanced style of writing compared to her first. Her most popular novel was ''Too Strange not to Be True'', which was published in 1864. The novel described the life of a poverty stricken French emigrant fighting for survival in the wilds of Canada.]
Reception
In a margin note in his copy of ''Ellen Middleton'', a psychological tale of a woman who carries the guilty secret that her brief act of violence resulted in a child's accidental death, American author Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wid ...
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."
Like most critics, ''Fraser's Magazine'' responded approvingly in 1844 to Fullerton's first effort: "To say of ''Ellen Middleton'' that it evinces extraordinary talent in the writer, would be to make use of language which is quite inappropriate to the occasion. It is not talent, but power – marvelous power over the deeper feelings of the human heart, which these burning pages set forth."
Responding in October 1847 to Fullerton's second novel ''Grantley Manor'', about a Protestant husband and Catholic wife unable to live together openly due to his father's prejudice against that religion, the reviewer for ''The New Monthly Belle Assemblée'' castigated her for her rejection of Anglicanism in favor of "Romish glories," commenting, "It is all very well, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, to expel the sin of bigotry, and the falsehood of those rampant Calvinists, who teach children that the Pope is the devil without his horns. We know there are many excellent Christians in that other faith, though it be full of pitfalls...but we do not see either profit or pleasure in the task of illuminating with the pictures of your genius the dull old missal which has been forgotten in England since the glorious Reformation."
References
Bibliography
*
* ''Brockhaus Enzyklopädie'' 14. edition (German) 1902
* [IT
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, una scrittrice dall'animo buono
* [IT] Georgiana Fullerton, ''Rose Leblanc'', traduzione di Riccardo Mainetti, flower-ed 2019
External links
*
Works by Georgiana Fullerton
at HathiTrust
*
Works by Georgiana Fullerton
at Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fullerton, Georgiana
1812 births
1885 deaths
19th-century English novelists
19th-century English women writers
Converts to Roman Catholicism
Daughters of British earls
English religious writers
English Roman Catholics
English women novelists
English women poets
Leveson-Gower family
Roman Catholic writers
Founders of English schools and colleges
Victorian novelists
Victorian poets
Victorian women writers
Women religious writers