Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland

At this time her old friend the Duchess of Portland made her an interest-free loan of four hundred pounds which enabled her to buy a house, as well as inviting her to spend every summer...

Back in England in her second widowhood, MD was a frequent visitor to her lifelong, very close friend the Duchess of Portland . The duchess, an amateur scientist of unusual talent and achievement, brought MD

In the early years of her second widowhood, MD took to staying half the year with the Duchess of Portland at her estate at Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire. She spent her winters...

She began using the new technique in 1772. The idea of the collection dates from 1774, but she included in it a few representations made before that. She titled the volumes Plants copied after Nature...

She probably kept it for far longer than these surviving years; the original may have been destroyed by her grandson. The extant passages, probably first transcribed during her lifetime, are known from an eighteenth-century copy...

LAC was helped with her literary labours by several scribes, notably one Edward Langley . Of the four copies which she dictated and kept at various of her residences, one survives, corrected by herself: in...