The Reluctant Aristocrat

Victorian aristocrat Mary, Marchioness of Huntly found royal balls and London society "suffocating". A woman of fierce intellect, she shied away from the limelight, finding her 'oxygen' in the emerging streams of thinking of her time; on Christianity, nature and botany, and the role of women. Mary wrote in her diary nearly every day of her life from the age of ten, leaving behind an account of her lifetime's reading and response to it that appears to be unsurpassed among Victorian diaries.