In Naples, Blessington spent the happiest two and a half years of her life (Clay 1979b, 153). She devoted 283 pages to describing the period in The Idler in Italy (vol. 2); in 1979 the pages were published separately as the Neapolitan Journals in Elizabeth Clay's edition titled Lady Blessington at Naples (Blessington 1979) At the time Naples was considered a place of great natural beauty, benign climate and antiquarian curiosities (Sweet 2012, 67, 164, 192). I touched upon these aspects in the previous chapters dealing with aesthetics. Nonetheless, as Rosemary Sweet points out, Naples, unlike other cities, in the consciousness of most travellers was the place composed of more ephemeral and subjective aspects – that is, ‘its people, its ambience, its way of life’ (ibid., 164). In this chapter I argue that Blessington's experience of Naples may be characterized as an attempt to appropriate this space according to her English standards, thus keeping its foreignness at a distance, on the one hand, but having a desire to cross its boundaries and surrender to it, on the other.

On her arrival in the city, as is usual when she plans a long sojourn someplace, Blessington instantly becomes preoccupied with house hunting, in order to find a suitable abode for herself and for her family circle. The countess wishes Naples to become a home away from home, since London was not very hospitable to her. Despite being far from England, she cannot free herself from the ideological constraint of pre- Victorian society, according to which the place of a woman was mostly at home. Mary Poovey coined the term ‘the Proper Lady’ to characterize the feminine ideal that developed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century England (Poovey 1984, ix). Originally aimed at middle- class women, the ideal could easily be extended to all women, notwithstanding their social position, who aspired to live by some specific standards. The proper lady was supposed to be dependent on her husband, decorous and, most pertinently here, domestic. With her devotion to Lord Blessington, her ladylike manners and attempt to become the proper mistress of her new abode, Marguerite Blessington appears suited for the role.