Regency Personalities Series

In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Lady Maria Theresa Lewis

8 March 1803 – 9 November 1865

Maria Theresa Lewis

Lady Maria Theresa Lewis was the daughter of George Villiers and Theresa Parker.

On 6 November 1830, Lister married the novelist Thomas Henry Lister. They had three children: Thomas, Maria and Alice.

Thomas Villiers Lister (1832-1902) married first Fanny Harriet Coryton and secondly Florence Selina Hamilton, daughter of geologist William John Hamilton and his second wife Margaret Frances Florence Dillon. Maria Theresa Lister (died 1 February 1863) married the politician William Vernon Harcourt, by whom she had a son, Lewis Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt. And lastly Alice Beatrice Lister (died 28 March 1898) married Algernon Borthwick, 1st Baron Glenesk, owner of the London newspaper the Morning Post, by whom she had a Lilian Margaret Frances Borthwick, who married Seymour Bathurst, 7th Earl Bathurst.

Lister died in 1842 and in 1844 she remarried. Lewis had Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon as one of her ancestors and her new husband, George Cornewall Lewis, compiled his biography. Lewis’s career was promoted by his wife in London society and by her family.

In 1852 Lewis published her first work which was a group of biographies based on the people known to Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, and it was titled The Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon. The book was intended to illustrate the portraits in Clarendon’s gallery at The Grove, Watford.

Lewis’s work so impressed the writer Mary Berry that she left her papers to Lewis (via Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis} so that Lewis could in 1865 publish Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the year 1783 to 1852.

Lady Lewis also edited a novel by the Hon. Emily Eden called The Semi-Detached House in 1859, and she wrote two plays, based on fairy tales, for children to perform. Lewis died in Brasenose College in Oxford in 1865 from cancer.