Lady Mary Lovelace

Born Mary Caroline Stuart-Wortley, she grew up in London in a small house in St. James Place with her parents, the politician Rt. Hon. James Archibald Stuart-Wortley and noted philanthropist Hon Jane Stuart-Wortley (née Lawley), and four siblings.[1] She trained as an artist at the Slade School in Gower Street, an undertaking made more difficult by requiring accompaniment on the journey to and from so as to maintain respectability.[1] She married Ralph King Milbanke Lord Wentworth (who became Earl of Lovelace) at 32, an age that was considered unusually old for the time.[1] After marrying, she continued painting, exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery, as well as training with a firm of architects in 1893 that included C.F.A. Voysey, an architect and furniture and textile designer who worked in the Arts and Crafts style,[2][3] a movement that influenced her considerably.[1] This training gave her the ability to design and improve cottages on her husband’s properties at Ockham Park, Surrey, and Ashley Combe, Somerset.[2] According to the “Historic Ockham” Facebook group, she designed the Parish Rooms and the Lovelace Cottages which were gifted to the villagers of Ockham.[4] During the First World War, she organized the reconstruction of a small harbour at Porlock Weir which, upon completion, was able to supply timber for the building of trenches.[1] Additionally, she was a member of the Chelsea Society, a charitable society concerned with architecture, land use, and infrastructural planning within the Chelsea area of London,[5] as well as a committee member of the Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA), an arts education society based in London, and the Kyrle Society, who campaigned for ‘open spaces” as well as the Recreational Evening Class Movement.[3]

Ockham Parish Rooms designed by Lady Mary Lovelace, demolished in 2022. Photo by Garry Walton.

The most well documented architectural work of Lady Mary Lovelace is a work attributed to C.F.A. Voysey called the Lilleycombe House, built near Porlock, Somerset.[6] Due to the latter's notoriety, it was featured in The British Architect in 1912, before construction, described as such:

"This house has been designed by Mary, Countess of Lovelace, assisted by Mr. C.F.A. Voysey, of 23, York Place, W. It is to be built in local stone and cement roughcast, and roofed with Delabode slates. The site being a steep slope to the south overlooking a great valley, with Exmoor beyond, will account for the varying levels of the floors. Every precaution was necessary to guard against the south-west winds."[6]

Lillycombe South Elevation drawing by Lady Mary Lovelace assisted by C.F.A. Voysey.

Lillycombe House plan and elevation by Lady Mary Loveless assisted by C.F.A. Voysey

Lady Mary Lovelace was also a writer and editor; she wrote the introduction and edited a book by her husband, titled Astarte, about his grandfather, Lord Byron, the famous poet.[7]Additionally, she published a memoir about her husband.[8]

Due to her work in multiple disciplines, including philanthropy, Lady Mary Lovelace has been described by art historian Anne Anderson as a “lady reformer” or “’new woman’ of the era who quietly reshaped the roles and responsibilities of women in later Victorian and Edwardian England.”[3] While she is remembered as working towards the advancement of women, her brand of feminism is described as “want[ing] to gain admittance into the world of policy making, not disrupt[ing] it.”[3] As a notable woman of her time, Mary was portrayed in Edward Burne-Jones' famous painting, The Golden Stairs.[9]