Maria Foote

On 2 January 1815 she played Miranda in The Tempest, and 17 April 1815 was the original Adela in the Fortune of War, attributed to James Kenney.

Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage, Hippolita in an alteration of The Tempest, Lady Percy in King Henry IV, Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream, and many other parts, chiefly secondary, in old pieces and new, then followed.

She played with success in both Ireland and Scotland, and accompanied John Liston, Tyrone Power, and other actors to Paris, where they all acted with unsatisfactory results.

These proceedings gave rise to pamphlet warfare, through which and through some opposition on the stage Miss Foote retained a measure of public sympathy.

On 9 March 1826 she made as Letitia Hardy her first appearance at Drury Lane Theatre, where also she played Violante in The Wonder, Rosalind, Virginia, Maria in A Roland for an Oliver, Imogen, and Maggy in The Highland Reel.

Her theatrical career closed at Birmingham on 11 March 1831, and on 7 April of the same year she married Charles Stanhope, 4th Earl of Harrington.

358-9).A writer in the New Monthly Magazine for March 1821, variously stated to be Thomas Noon Talfourd, Thomas Campbell, and Horace Smith, wrote warmly concerning 'the pure and innocent beauty with which she has enriched our imaginations,' and, referring to her then anticipated departure, asks rhapsodically, 'Is comedy entirely to lose the most delicate and graceful of its handmaidens and tragedy the loveliest of its sufferers?'

A whole-length portrait by George Clint of Miss Foote as Maria Darlington was sold in June 1847, with the effects of Thomas Harris, lessee of Covent Garden.

Maria Foote, afterwards Countess of Harrington; From an engraved portrait in the collection of A. M. Broadley, Esq.
Maria Foote, afterwards Countess of Harrington, as Maria Darlington in the farce of "A Rowland for an Oliver" (1824) —frontispiece, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events , Baring-Gould, S.