Mrs Delany: A Life

Posted by Verity on November 10, 2025 in Book review, History, society, women artists | 2 comments

Clarissa Campbell Orr, Yale University Press, 2019

If you have been to the British Museum, you may have seen Mary Delany’s unique flower collages: exquisitely detailed botanical portraits on a plain black ground. This Flora Delanica is what she is principally famous for, yet they are the culmination of a lifetime of creativity – and an extraordinary life – documented in Clarissa Campbell Orr’s authoritative biography.

Her youth was somewhat disrupted. In 1715, when she was 15, she and her sisters were woken in the small hours by 20 soldiers invading their London house. It was the start of her family’s exile from London on account of their Jacobite sympathies.

Banished to the country, without fortune or hope of preferment, their prospects looked bleak. But Mary was the instrument for restoring them: her uncle introduced her to Alexander Pendarves, a man 40 years her senior ( her first impression of him was that he looked like ‘Hob out of the well’ – a stock comic character – with ‘dirty boots… [a] large, unwieldy person… crimson countenance’) and made it clear that she was expected to marry him for the sake of the family.

She did so reluctantly and endured eight years of marriage before Mr Pendarves succumbed to the effects of excessive drinking and died, leaving her enough money to have an independent existence in London, and so she began to flourish – both as an artistic creator and as a valued social presence.

Her social skills, intellectual curiosity, wit and kindness made her company sought after by a wide range of ‘society’, both in London and in the country. Handel was a particularly close friend, and used to call round, often with a soprano or two in tow, and play his latest compositions to the assembled company. Towards the end of her life, when she was a widow in her late eighties living in Windsor, King George III and Queen Charlotte were popping round constantly (which was something of an irony, since she had failed to gain a position at court earlier in her life.)

Alongside the social round, she continued to explore and develop cultural pursuits: reading, music, writing poetry, drawing, painting, designing follies and garden features as well as her own ballgowns, collecting shells for creating fantastical wall decorations. On top of this she maintained a strong engagement in politics and a copious correspondence with family and friends that has proved a rich source for historians of the period. You didn’t need TV news if you had received a long letter from her about all the goings-on at court.

This merry widowhood came to an end in 1743, when she received a proposal from Dean Patrick Delany, an Irish cleric she had met during a delightful sojourn in Dublin a few years previously. He had just been widowed: ‘I feel a sad void in my breast, and am reduced to the necessity of wanting to fill it.’ According to the mores of the time this was not indecent haste, and they duly married. It was indeed a marriage of true minds: their domestic and creative happiness lasted until the dean’s death in 1768.

It was at the age of 72 she invented her technique of paper collage for depicting flowers. She hoped to complete 1000 such pictures, and enthusiastic friends aided and abetted her by donating specimens from their gardens, or even having them sent from the colonies. Sadly, she just missed her target: her cataracts eventually left her unable to see well enough to undertake such fine work. Nevertheless, her 985 pictures are in themselves a towering achievement.

This teeming biography has all the immediacy of a story often told in the words of the protagonists themselves – just be prepared to get your duchesses mixed up from time to time. Despite this, and the progressive momentum represented by the bluestocking circle and the engagement with the ideas of Rousseau, you can’t help but reflect on the inequity of Delany’s milieu. Nepo babies abound, as all prestigious posts are allocated on the basis of somebody well-connected and influential putting in a word for you – the Admiralty goes along with Mrs Delany’s recommendation for the captaincy of a ship. Clearly they were as in thrall to her charm as the reader becomes in entering Mrs Delany’s circle.