She was sent to England as a young child, and her parents subsequently settled to live at Stanmore, Middlesex.

She spent part of the year, until his death in 1877, at her salon in Paris, which attracted the leading liberals.

It included Odilon Barrot, Montalembert, Charles de Rémusat, François Mignet, Henri Martin, Laboulaye, Joseph d'Haussonville, Pierre Lanfrey, and Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol.

Antipathy to the Second French Empire and to ultramontanism united royalists and republicans, liberal Catholics and theists.

She also founded an English nurses' home in Paris, with a branch at Nice; the latter was still in existence at the end of the nineteenth century.