Lady Georgiana Fullerton (née Leveson-Gower; 23 September 1812 – 19 January 1885) was an English novelist, philanthropist, biographer, and school founder. She was born into a noble political family. She was one of the foremost Roman Catholic novelists writing in England during the nineteenth century.
Biography
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, born as Lady Georgiana Charlotte Leveson-Gower, was born at home in Tixall Hall, Staffordshire, England. She was the second daughter of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Earl of Granville, and Lady Harriet Elizabeth Cavendish. She was baptized in the Anglican faith on 10 October 1812, in Tixall Hall, where her family was staying at the time.
For many of her younger years, she resided in Paris, where her father served as the English ambassador. While there she had occasion to take piano lessons from a young Franz Liszt.
Marriage and conversion
On 13 July 1833, Lady Georgiana married embassy attaché Alexander George Fullerton, in Paris. She and her husband left Paris 8 years later, when her father retired from the embassy. They lived in Rome for a few years, where her husband converted to Roman Catholicism. She followed in his footsteps and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on Passion Sunday, 29 March 1846 in London.
In London, she joined Margaret Radclyffe Livingstone Eyre and Cecil Chetwynd Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian who, like her, were recent aristocratic converts to Catholicism. The three of them were a known source of Catholic philanthropy.
In 1855, her only son died at the age of 21, overwhelming her with grief and throwing her and her husband into a permanent state of mourning. After the loss of her only son, she devoted herself to works of philanthropy and charity. In 1856, she adopted the Franciscan tradition by enrolling herself in the Third Order of Saint Francis. At the time of the 1861 England Census, she, her husband, and eleven servants lived at 27 Chapel St in the fashionable St. George Hanover Square, Mayfair, London.
