Travel writers have always borrowed from the world of fiction. Some of them wrote accounts of travels that were solely fictional, since the travels described never took place (see Adams 1962).Those who travelled and recorded their travels consciously reworked their diaries, applying the same techniques that novelists used, especially when they were novelists themselves (see Moroz 2013, 104– 8), as Blessington was. Even at first glance, one notices that, although her texts are conventional in terms of linear narration, moving from place to place, she manipulates the temporality of her journeys. Some stretches of time elicit but brief comments. For instance, when the narrator wishes to spare her readers tedious details of the journey between places (and in consequence make the narration more dynamic), she simply remarks: ‘I pass over the hackneyed road from London to Hartford Bridge without comment’ (IoW 2). In contrast, on other occasions the travel time may be prolonged, for example when the author relates some anecdote concerning the actual location or describes landscapes that are of importance to her. Within Blessington's accounts of longer sojourns in one place, observations and reflections typical of nonfictional travel writing are intersected with passages reminiscent of fictional forms, which is my focus in this chapter.

Blessington authored eleven novels, all of which draw on or follow the pattern of the fashionable novel. Fashionable novels, or silver fork novels, presented the life of the aristocracy during the Regency period and, at least presumably, were written by the members of this class. They were in vogue from the mid- 1820s to the 1840s. One of the figures who contributed to their popularity was publisher Henry Colburn, who canonized the writers of the genre in the series Colburn's Modern Standard Novelists (1835– 41), which included Lady Blessington.

Blessington is known to have used her personal experiences to write her fashionable novels (O'Cinneide 2008, 35). This fact was even used as an argument that the reality depicted therein was verifiable. To give but one example, a reviewer of The Two Friends, which depicts the fashionable society of England, France and Italy, observes that ‘Lady Blessington has seen the world, and is an acute observer of it in the circles in which she has moved’ (Literary Gazette, 1835, 69), and claims that she is the right person to represent the life of aristocracy in novels.