Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1789–1849), was a well-known and popular hostess and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre comprises 11 novels, predominantly with central plots of love and marriage, as well as short stories and poems. Her protagonists travel abroad (especially to Italy) and belong to the fashionable world of great houses, balls, and duels, a world Blessington herself knew but rendered with ambivalence. She edited popular annuals, The Keepsake (1841–50) and Heath’s Book of Beauty (1834–50), expensive gift books aimed at a female readership, and authored the Conversations of Lord Byron (1834; 1969), documenting her acquaintance with the celebrity poet. Several travelogues, most notably The Idler in Italy (1839–40), throw light on her extensive journeys and on her life on the continent. Her literary activities are inseparable from the salons she hosted, where writers, editors, publishers, and reviewers met.