Lady Louisa Stuart - Work

Work

For fear of losing caste as a lady of quality, Stuart had no wish to see anything she had written published under her name, and it was not until 1895, more than forty years after her death, that this happened. Lockhart's Life of Scott (1837—1838) had contained several of Sir Walter Scott's letters to Stuart. In a letter to his publisher Robert Cadell, Scott writes "I trust you have received the printed sheets of Lady Louisa Stuart, but for your life mention her name."

Much of Stuart's writing is still in the form of unpublished memoirs and letters, mostly addressed to women, but interest in her as an observer of her times began to increase towards the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1895 and 1898, Mrs Godfrey Clark edited and published three volumes of Stuart's work called Gleanings from an Old Portfolio (Correspondence of Lady Louisa Stuart), and the Hon. James A. Home followed these with Lady Louisa Stuart: Selections from her Manuscripts (New York & London: Harper Brothers, 1899) and with two volumes of Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton, published in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1903.

Stuart's memoir of Lady Mary Coke, written in 1827, represents Coke as a virtuous woman suffering from a brutal husband, but also as a tragedy queen subject to paranoia. Her essay Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu (published anonymously as an introduction to the 1837 edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters and Works) focusses largely on the work and political position of Lady Mary's husband Edward Wortley Montagu, giving Stuart the chance to air her own views on Wortley Montagu, Walpole, Harley, Halifax, and the Whigs and Tories generally, demonstrating her own loyalty to the side of the Tories. Devoney Looser considers that Stuart (whom she calls "the socially correct octogenarian") was troubled by her grandmother's focus on sexual intrigues and says that Stuart did not see Lady Mary's Account of the Court of George I at his Accession as history.

Conscious of Walter Scott's, Alexander Pope's and Samuel Johnson's poetry, Stuart wrote verses of her own, including fables and a ballad about cannibal brothers and what happens to an unfortunate woman who has married for money.

Stuart was not a Bluestocking, and although her writing has a dash of malicious humour, it lacks their mutual admiration. She had a great lady's fine scorn for Elizabeth Montagu's habit of welcoming into society those born outside its pale, and she ridiculed "college geniuses with nothing but a book in their pockets". She wrote "The only blue stocking meetings which I myself ever attended were those at Mrs Walsingham’s and Mrs Montagu’s. To frequent the latter, however, was to drink at the fountain-head..."

Jill Rubenstein describes Stuart as "Tory to the bone, never having forgiven the pain inflicted on her father by the scurrilous personal attacks of Wilkes and others" and compares her politics to those of Sir Walter Scott, "a principled and consistent conservatism".

Professor Karl Miller, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, praises Stuart's "magnificent pieces of writing". He also reports on her inconsistencies. On the matter of the emancipation of women, she was both for and against it, and while she favoured the old order in politics and had an aversion to the mob, she also admired "unadorned human worth". Miller calls Stuart "the least-known, but by no means the least, of the good writers of her long lifetime".