Mary Delany

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Mary Delany, nee Granville (14 May 1700 – 15 April 1788) was an English Bluestocking, artist, and writer.

She was born at Coulston, Wiltshire, a niece of the 1st Lord Lansdowne. In February 1718 she was unhappily married to Alexander Pendarves, a wealthy Cornish landowner considerably her senior, who died in 1724. During a visit to Ireland she met Jonathan Swift and his close friend, the Irish cleric, Patrick Delany, whom she married in 1743. After his death in 1768 she passed all her summers with her intimate friend the Dowager Duchess of Portland, who introduced her to George III and Queen Charlotte.

In 1771, Delany began to create cut out paper artworks (decoupage) as was the fashion for ladies of the court. Her works were exceptionally detailed and botanically accurate depictions of plants. She used tissue paper and hand colouration to produce these pieces. She created 1,700 of these works, calling them her "Paper Mosaiks [sic]", from the age of 71 to 88 when her eyesight failed her. They can still be seen in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum today.

When Dowager died, George and Charlotte gave her a small house at Windsor and a pension of 300 pounds a year.

Frances Burney (Madame D'Arblay) was introduced to her in 1783, and frequently visited her at her London home and at Windsor, and owed to her friendship her court appointment. Delany, in her eighties at this time, had a reputation for cutting out and making the intricate paper mosaics (collages) now in the British Museum. She had known many of the luminaries of her day, had corresponded with Jonathan Swift, Sir Joseph Banks, and Young, and left a detailed picture of polite English society of the 18th century in her six volumes of Autobiography and Letters (ed. Lady Llanover, 1861-1862). Burke calls her "a real fine lady, the model of an accomplished woman of former times".

In the year 2000, her descendant, Ruth Hayden, published a book on Delany's work: Mrs. Delany; Her Life and Her Flowers (British Museum Press).

[edit] References

• Blain, Virginia, et al., eds. "Delany, Mary." The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990. 278-79.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.