Manuscript diary.
KENYON (Louisa Mary Beaumont), 1839-1873. Her autograph diary, 24 April 1857 - 26 April 1858. 8vo. Original quarter roan, continental marbled boards. 94 ff., approximately 15,000 words.
Louisa Kenyon was the daughter of Edward Lloyd Kenyon, of Pen-y-lan, Denbighshire, and Louisa May Marker. His death in 1843, when Louisa was four years old, made her a substantial heiress, the estate being held for her in trust. In 1854 her trustees decided to sell the estate, the monies being held (as the diary makes clear) until she came of age or married. She and her mother moved to Boulogne in 1851 where her uncle, Henry William Marker, her aunt and her cousins also lived. (Marker had spent extravagantly and was forced to sell his estate, Combe House, Devon.) Louisa's diary covers a year of expatriate life in Boulogne, then a refuge for the impoverished and the disgraced. Her life, as she describes it, is "certainly not a gay one." There is a round of walks in the town gardens or on the ramparts, visits to other members of the English community, Italian lessons, some painting and drawing, and concert-going. Her main interest is a sentimental one in her cousin Richard ("Dickie") Marker. His visits and letters are keenly anticipated; his presence an opportunity for "spooning"; his departures an occasion for "blubbing." In a passage towards the end of the journal she reflects on her spinster condition and stultifying life, keenly aware of her shortcomings: "My head is a horrible chaos of indifferent silly thoughts." Marriage, clearly, is her only solution. However, by the end of the diary nothing has been resolved with Dickie. (Nor would it be, as Louisa married Henry Albert Fuller of the 83rd Regiment in 1865.) Complications from her father's early death would come back to haunt her in 1865. A case was moved in chancery by his unsatisfied creditors against her and her uncle Henry William Marker, the creditors having possibly bided their time until she had returned to England for her marriage. She was widowed in 1867 and died in 1873 in Brussels. Head and foot of spine worn.
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