Notorious Lady: Doris Leslie

Margaret Power was born the 'ugly duckling' in a family of beautiful children in Ireland in 1789. But by her early teens, she showed promise of remarkable beauty. Her father, ruined by drink and disaster, sold her in marriage to a sadistic brute. She left him after three months of such misery that left her sexually frigid for life. She survived and sought shelter with a Hampshire squire, whose vast library fed her ambition to be literate. Soon she attracted the attention of the wealthy Lord Mountjoy - and when the sudden death of her former husband set her free, Mountjoy (by then Lord Blessington) married her. This was the start of Lady Blessington's career as a famous hostess in literary London. Among her friends were Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Alfred D'Orsay and Byron. Deaths and family disasters, financial shipwreck caused by the men who sponged off her, the fickleness of the reading public were all challenges that gave her strength to carry on pouring out cheap journalism and fashionable novels until she - and the market - collapsed. Here is the life story of a courageous, beautiful, slightly ridiculous woman, who had grit and guts enough to survive the enmities of Regency London's social life and revolutionary Paris.