Name Georgiana Chatterton | Role Author | |
Died 1876, Warwickshire, United Kingdom Books Home Sketches and Forei, Rambles in the South of Ireland, Memorials - Personal and Histo | ||
Georgiana, Lady Chatterton, later Mrs Dering (née Iremonger; 11 November 1806 – 6 February 1876) was a British traveller and author.
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Life
Henrietta Georgiana Marcia Lascelles Iremonger was born at 24 Arlington Street, Piccadilly, London, on 11 November 1806, the only child of the Rev. Lascelles Iremonger (died 6 January 1830), prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, and his second wife, the former Harriett Gambier, youngest sister of Admiral Lord James Gambier.
On 3 August 1824, she married Sir William Abraham Chatterton, 2nd Baronet of Castle Mahon, County Cork. The Great Irish Famine in 1845–51 deprived her husband of his rents. They retired to a small house at Bloxworth, Dorset, until 1852, when they moved to Rolls Park, Essex, where Sir William died on 5 August 1855.
On 1 June 1859, the widow married a fellow novelist, Edward Heneage Dering (born 1827, youngest son of John Dering, rector of Pluckley, Kent, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral), who had retired from the army in 1851. They took up residence in 1869 with her ward and niece, Rebecca Ferrers (née Orpen), and her husband Marmion, the last old squire of Baddesley Clinton Hall, Warwickshire. There, Marmion and Dering took to wearing 17th-century costume. Twenty years Georgiana's junior, Dering was the author of the novels Lethelier and A Great Sensation (1862). Within six years of their marriage, Dering was received into the Roman Catholic Church. She herself wavered, but after a correspondence with William Bernard Ullathorne, Bishop of Birmingham, she converted in August 1875.
Georgiana Dering died at Baddesley Clinton Hall on 6 February 1876, aged 69.
Writings
Lady Chatterton's first book, Aunt Dorothy's Tales, was published anonymously in two volumes in 1837. Two years later came Rambles in the South of Ireland, whose first edition sold out in a few weeks. After this she wrote many tales, novels, poems, and accounts of travels under the name Georgiana Chatterton.
Cardinal John Henry Newman praised the refinement of thought in her later fiction. More recently, however, her work has been described as banal and called "uniformly unmemorable".