Louisa Stuart Costello (October 9, 1799 – April 24, 1870) was a writer on travel and French history.
Costello was born in Ireland[1] or Sussex.[2][3]
She resided in Paris, France,[3] near the Seine River (per her death certificate).
She had no true home, but wandered place to place staying with friends and acquaintances. With her brother Dudley Costello, also a well known for his travel writing, they promoted the copying of illuminated manuscript,[1] (b. 1803 in Sussex d. 1865 from liver failure) drank himself to death after the death of his wife.
She wrote over 100 texts, articles, poems, songs and knew such people as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore. She was a poet, historian, journalist, painter and novelist. Her father was Colonel James Francis Costello, who died in April 1814 while fighting Napoleon.[1]
Costello published Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen (1844), which included her illustrations, and several other popular works of poetry and travel. Her collection Songs of a Stranger was dedicated to William Lisle Bowles.[1] She did not return to France until after her mother sent for her in 1815/18 and then lived chiefly in Paris, where she was a miniature-painter.
In 1815 she published The Maid of the Cyprus Isle, etc. She also wrote books of travel, which were very popular, as were her novels, chiefly founded on French history. Another work, published in 1835, is Specimens of the Early Poetry of France. She died in Boulogne sur Mer, France of mouth cancer.[3]
An example of her work - an early expression of anti-war sentiment:-
On Reading the Account of the Battle of Waterloo