Waterloo, Napoleon, and the Vision of Peace in Louisa Stuart Costello’s The Maid of the Cyprus Isle

TIMOTHY RUPPERT Waterloo, Napoleon, and the Vision ofPeace in Louisa Stuart Costello’s The Maid ofthe I N BOTH WOMEN WRITERS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDIEVALISM (2OO9) and the “Introduction” to her edition of Elizabeth Tothridge Costello’s 1809 novel The Soldier’s Orphan: A Tale (2011), Clare Broome Saunders casts new light on the life and career of Elizabeth’s daughter, Louisa Stuart Costello, a once celebrated but now scarcely known Irish miniaturist and author whose “contemporaries regarded [her] so highly that in 1845 her re­ quest for a civil list pension was granted.”1 An intelligent and marketable talent, Costello published histories, such as the four-volume Memoirs ofEm­ inent Englishwomen (1844), and translations, such as Specimens ofthe Early Po­ etry ofFrance (1835) and The Rose Garden ofPersia (184$), but seemed to ex­ cel as a travel writer who, as Teresa A. Lyle suggests, “created [her] own grand tour experience” and then “unabashedly offered her work as a major contribution to the growing travel literature on Europe.”2 Works in this vein include her two-volume A Pilgrimage to Auvergne, from Picardy to Le Velay in 1842, her The Falls, Lakes, and Mountains, of North Wales in 1845, and her A Tour to andfrom Venice, by the Vaudois and the Tyrol in 1846, as well as several “Sketches of Legendary Cities” for Bentley’s Miscellany, in­ cluding pieces on Shrewsbury, Bath, Tintern Abbey, and Bristol. Here and I am grateful to Clare Broome Saunders, whose email correspondence helped to contex­ tualize my argument. 1. Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century /Medievalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9. See also “Introduction,” in The Soldier's Orphan: A Tale, by Elizabeth Tothridge Costello, ed. Saunders (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vii—xvh. 2. Lyle, “Louisa Stuart Costello,” in British Travel Writers, 1837—1875, vol. 166 ofDietionary of Literary Biography, eds. Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergits (Detroit: Gale, 1996), 130. SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) 555 556 TIMOTHY RUPPERT elsewhere, Costello’s independence of mind, strength of spirit, and origi­ nality of style distinguish her as “an important anomaly” whose confidence in her own perceptiveness and narrative skills helps to render the illusion that she traveled alone across the United Kingdom and the Continent.' If her Victorian-era prose sets Costello apart as especially self-assured and intellectually vivacious, as Lyle claims, then these qualities have their nascence in Costello’s Regency-era debut volume, The Maid ofthe Cyprus Isle (1815), or, more precisely, in a triptych of topical companion poems—“On Reading the Account of the Battle of Waterloo,” “Verses, on the Picture of the King of Rome, Holding Violets,” and “Napoleon, on his Residence in St. Helena”—that hints at the assertiveness and independence we find in Lyle’s portrait ofthe Victorian traveler. These poems indicate their author’s cosmopolitan outlook, a frame of mind that recalls first-wave Romantics such as Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith while reflecting the resistance of some second-wave Romantics to the often bloodthirsty triumphalism then widespread in Britain (as captured, for example, by the original version of William Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode)S This cosmopolitanism excites particular interest in light ofthe poet’s age. Like Felicia Hemans, Eleanor Anne Porden, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Canadian novelist Julia Catherine Beckwith, Costello showed precocious creative gifts: her first book appeared when, by all accounts, she was sixteen years old.3 4 5 6 But unlike Hemans or Shelley, Costello is a lost Romantic voice who remains ne­ glected even as very recent work from Stephen C. Behrendt and Beth Lau excites fresh interest in the recovery and recontextualization of such voices/’ The recovery of her work becomes a more compelling task when 3. Lyle, “Louisa Stuart Costello,” 133. 4. Recent treatments of Romantic cosmopolitanism and the internationalist perspective include Jon Klancher’s “Discriminations, or Romantic Cosmopolitanisms in London” in Ro­ mantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840, eds. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65—82; Angela Keane's “Forgotten Sentiments: Helen Maria Williams’s ‘Letters from Trance"' in Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press...

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