Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville

Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville was a British society hostess and writer. The younger daughter of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, she was a member of the wealthy Cavendish and Spencer families. A prolific writer of letters, Harriet corresponded with others for most of her life.

About Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville in brief

Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville was a British society hostess and writer. The younger daughter of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, she was a member of the wealthy Cavendish and Spencer families. A prolific writer of letters, Harriet corresponded with others for most of her life. Historians have since found her detailed accounts to be a valuable source of information on life as an ambassadress as well as life in the 19th-century aristocracy. Harriet was named after the Duchess’s sister Henrietta and her friend Lady Elizabeth Foster. She had a somewhat uneasy relationship with her father throughout his life. In her early years she was devoted to her loving mother, though this relationship suffered a temporary setback in the 1790s. The Duchess, pregnant by the future prime minister Charles Grey, was forced to move abroad and give birth in secret. The birth of the long-desired heir, Harriet’s brother William, arrived in 1790 after 16 years of marriage. As Harriet was neither the eldest nor the desired male heir, she was probably the least favorite of her parents’ three children. She became a prominent supporter and hostess of the Whig Party, aswell as a leader of fashion. As she grew older it became readily apparent that she lacked her mother’s beauty and slimness, including that she did not have her sister’s wittyness in conversation. While Georgiana’s first season in London drew her to London, Harriet quickly drew her attention to all things fashionable, including fashion, music and the arts. She was also a keen reader, especially of the books she was reading at the time of her marriage to Granville Leveson Gower.

In 1809 Harriet married Granville Leves on Gower, a diplomat who had been her maternal aunt’s lover for seventeen years. Despite this unusual connection, the couple’s marriage was happy and they had five children. During intermittent periods between 1824 and 1841, Granville served as the British ambassador to France, requiring Harriet to perform a relentless array of social duties in Paris that she often found exhausting and frivolous. Harriet and her siblings, who did not understand why Elizabeth resided with them, disliked her; they also held antipathy for her two teenage sons from a previous marriage, who joined the household in 1796. When Harriet was three, Lady Spencer hired Miss Selina Trimmer as their new governess. Deeply religious, Selina encouraged her charges to be morally upright and strove to provide a stable upbringing with a good education. Though she was often severe, Seline became a figure in Harriet’s life and had a lasting impact on her life, especially in later life, which thrived on her piety. The Dowager Countess Spencer felt theDevonshire household was amoral and took a prominent role in her grandchildren’s upbringing. The Duchess had two illegitimate children with Elizabeth Foster; they were raised alongside the legitimate Cavendishes. In 1782, Elizabeth Foster, who began living with the Cavendish family, encouraged the Duchess to pursue a healthier lifestyle.

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