The Countess Granville | |
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 Portrait by Thomas Barber, c. 1809 | |
| Born | Lady Henrietta Elizabeth Cavendish 29 August 1785 Devonshire House, Piccadilly, London, England |
| Died | 25 November 1862 (aged 77) 13 Hereford Street, Park Lane, London, England |
| Noble family | |
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Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville (née Lady Henrietta Elizabeth Cavendish; 29 August 1785 – 25 November 1862) was a British society hostess and writer. The younger daughter of Lady Georgiana Spencer and the 5th Duke of Devonshire, she was a member of the wealthy Cavendish and Spencer families and spent her childhood under the care of a governess with her two siblings.
In 1809 Harriet married Granville Leveson-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.
A prolific writer of letters, Harriet corresponded with others for most of her life, often humorously describing her observations of those around her. 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. Between 1894 and 1990, four edited collections of Harriet's correspondence were published.