She was born at Knockbrit, Tipperary, on the 1st of September, 1789. (The year, however, has been variously stated as 1787 and 1790.) She was the daughter of Edmund Power, a country gentleman and magistrate, a man of violent temper and without principle. In 1796 or ’97 the Powers removed to Clonmel. In 1804, when she was under fifteen years of age, Marguerite was forced by her father into a marriage with the vicious and half-insane Captain Maurice Farmer. Within a year they agreed to separate. Mrs. Farmer is spoken of as residing in Cahir, Tipperary, in 1807, and in Dublin in 1809. And now occurs that hiatus in the account of her life which has never been satisfactorily filled, and the existence of which the English women of her day refused to overlook. In 1816 she was established in Manchester Square, London; and in 1818, Captain Farmer having died the previous year, she married the Earl of Blessington. Her fashionable life, foreign travels, and literary career now began. In 1823, while at Genoa with her husband, she made the acquaintance of Lord Byron. In 1829 Lord Blessington died in the Hotel Ney, Paris, which had been sumptuously fitted up as his residence. Lady Blessington returned to London in 1830. She lived in Seamore Place, May Fair, until 1836, when she removed to Gore House, Kensington Gore. The extravagant splendor of her style of living, and the charm of her evenings, have often been described. The £2,000 a year which Lord Blessington had left her, even with the addition of the income received from her writings, was not sufficient to meet the expenses which long habit had rendered almost necessary to her; and in the spring of 1849 “the long-menaced break-up of the establishment at Gore House took place.” Lady Blessington left London, accompanied by her nieces, for Paris, where, on the 4th of June, 1849, she died very suddenly of “an apoplectic malady, complicated with disease of the heart.” Count D’Orsay, her husband’s son-in-law and her intimate friend, survived her but a few years, and was buried beside her at Chambourcy, where he had caused a huge monument to be erected to her memory. The following are the works of Lady Blessington: _The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis_, 1822. _Sketches and Fragments_, 1822. _Conversations with Lord Byron_, 1832. These articles first appeared in Colburn’s _New Monthly Magazine_. _Grace Cassidy; or, the Repealers_, 1833. _Meredyth_, 1833. _The Follies of Fashion_, 1835. _The Two Friends_, 1835. _The Victims of Society_, 1837. _The Confessions of an Elderly Lady_, 1838. _The Governess_, 1839. _Desultory Thoughts and Reflections_, 1839. _The Idler in Italy_, 1839. _The Idler in France_, 1841. _The Lottery of Life_, 1842. _Strathern; or, Life at Home and Abroad_, 1845. _The Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre_, 1846. _Lionel Deerhurst_, 1846. _Marmaduke Herbert_, 1847.