{{Short description|British miniature painter and author}} {{infobox person/Wikidata|fetchwikidata=ALL}} {{EngvarB|date=January 2019}} {{Use dmy dates|date=February 2025}}
'''Louisa Stuart Costello''' (9 October 1799 – 24 April 1870) was an Anglo-Irish author on travel and French history, said to have been born either in Ireland<ref name="Holloway" /><ref>David Clayton Browning/s ''Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography'', rev. ed. 1960 gives her birthplace as County Mayo (p. 156)</ref><ref>{{SBDEL|wstitle=Costello, Louisa Stuart |inline=1}}</ref> or Sussex.<ref name="Orlando">{{cite web |name-list-style=amp |editor=Brown, Susan |editor2=Patricia Clements |editor3=Isobel Grundy |title=Louisa Stuart Costello entry: Overview screen |url=https://orlando.cambridge.org/profiles/costlo |work=Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present |publisher=Cambridge University Press Online |location=Cambridge |accessdate=23 October 2010}}</ref> After having obtained a living at a young age as a painter to financially support her mother and brother, she went on to write an extensive corpus of articles, poetry, songs, novels and nonfictional books, including ''Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen'' and ''The Maid of the Cyprus Isle'', the former of which she herself illustrated. ''The Rose Garden of Persia'', her compilation of Persian poetry, was reissued thrice in the decades after her death in 1870. She travelled extensively and was, in her day, a popular travel writer.<ref name="Holloway" />
==Life and work== Costello lived in Paris, France,<ref name="Orlando" /> near the River Seine (according to her death certificate).{{Citation needed|date=October 2010}} She had no true home, but went from place to place staying with friends and acquaintances. She and her brother Dudley Costello, also well known for travel writing, promoted the copying of illuminated manuscripts.<ref name="Holloway" /> By the age of 15 she had become a proficient artist and later her earnings from miniature painting were enough to support her mother and to keep her brother while he attended Sandhurst.<ref>David Clayton Browning (1960) ''Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography''; rev. ed. London: J. M. Dent; p. 156</ref>
She wrote over 100 texts, articles, poems and songs, and knew such people as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore. She was also a historian, painter and novelist. Her father, Colonel James Francis Costello, died in April 1814 while fighting against Napoleon.<ref name="Holloway" />
Among Costello's published works is her self-illustrated ''Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen'' (1844), and several popular works of poetry and travel. Her collection ''Songs of a Stranger'' was dedicated to William Lisle Bowles.<ref name="Holloway">{{Cite web |url=http://www.unl.edu/Corvey/html/Etexts/CostelloLouisa/CostelloIntro.htm |title=Louisa Stuart Costello |last=Holloway |first=Tamara |year=2002 |publisher=Belser Wissenschaftlicher Dienst |accessdate=23 October 2010 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100531165341/http://www.unl.edu/Corvey/html/Etexts/CostelloLouisa/CostelloIntro.htm |archivedate=31 May 2010}}</ref> She returned to France only after her mother sent for her in 1815 or 1818, and then lived chiefly in Paris as a miniature-painter.
''The Maid of the Cyprus Isle'' (1815) was among many books of travel, which were very popular, as were her novels, which drew chiefly on French history. Other works are ''Specimens of the Early Poetry of France'' (1835) and ''Béarn and the Pyrenees : A legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre (1844)''. Her book ''The Rose Garden of Persia'' (1887) contains versions of poems or poem extracts taken from Persian, illustrated with imitations of Persian illuminations. There were reissues in 1888, 1899 and 1913.<ref>1887 & 1888 eds. published by John Slark, London.</ref><ref>British Library online catalogue.</ref>
Having never married, Costello died in Boulogne sur Mer, France, of mouth cancer.<ref name="Orlando" />
==References== {{Reflist}}
==Further reading== *Clare Broome Saunders: ''Louisa Stuart Costello: a nineteenth-century writing life'', New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, [2015], {{ISBN|978-1-137-34011-5}}
==External links== {{EB1911 poster|Costello, Dudley|Costello, Dudley & Louisa Stuart Costello}} *{{Commons category-inline}} *{{Gutenberg author | id=9095| name=Louisa Stuart Costello}} *{{Librivox author |id=13067}} *{{Internet Archive author |sname=Louisa Stuart Costello}} *[https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/591 Louisa Stuart Costello papers] at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Costello, Louisa Stuart}} Category:1799 births Category:1870 deaths Category:19th-century Irish travel writers Category:Irish women travel writers Category:Irish women non-fiction writers Category:19th-century Irish artists Category:Irish women poets Category:Writers from County Mayo Category:19th-century Irish poets Category:19th-century Irish women writers Category:Deaths from oral cancer in France Category:19th-century British women poets