Béarn and the Pyrenees

Louisa Stuart Costello

Louisa Stuart Costello was an Anglo-Irish author on travel and French history, said to have been born either in Ireland or Sussex. After having obtained a living at a young age as a painter to financially support her mother and brother, she went on to write an extensive corpus of articles, poetry, songs, novels and nonfictional books, including Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen and The Maid of the Cyprus Isle, the former of which she herself illustrated. The Rose Garden of Persia, her compilation of Persian poetry, was reissued thrice in the decades after her death in 1870. She travelled extensively and was, in her day, a popular travel writer.