Emy Gordon
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Emilie Caroline Albertine Gordon (née von Beulwitz) (6 March 1841 − 2 February 1909), known as Emy Gordon, was a German writer, translator and Catholic activist who was married to the Scottish diplomat George Gordon.[1]
Gordon was born in Cannstatt, near Stuttgart, to Hartmund von Beulwitz (1814−1871), a Protestant landowner, and his Catholic wife Nanette Riedlinger (1808−1869).[1]
In the 1860s she began an affair with George John Robert Gordon (1812−1902), a Scottish diplomat serving as Britain's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Württemberg, who had been married to Rosa Justina Young (1817−1891) since 1843. Nevertheless, he declared himself a bachelor and converted to Catholicism, and married Emilie von Beulwitz in Manchester in 1871, causing a scandal.[2][3]
Gordon and her husband had four children, three of whom were born before their marriage:[4]
- Georgina Gordon (1866−1958)
- Robert Gordon (b. 1869)
- Richard Wolf Gordon (b. 1870)
- Louise Ignace Therese Julie Gordon (b. 1872)
After her husband inherited his father's estate at Ellon Castle in Scotland in 1873, the family lived there for several years before moving to the continent, residing first in Bruges in Belgium before settling permanently in Würzburg in Germany. She and her husband were married in a civil ceremony in Maastricht in the Netherlands in 1892, after her husband's first wife died.[1]
Writing and translation work
In her later years Gordon published a number of books on home and family life, the most popular of which was Die Pflichten eines Dienstmädchens, oder: das A-B-C des Haushaltes (1894), a guide to the duties of the housewife. She also edited Die praktische Hausfrau (The Practical Housewife), a supplement to the regional Catholic newspaper Fränkisches Volksblatt, and published articles in several Catholic magazines.[1]
Gordon's translation work included the publication of a German version of Cardinal Manning's Why I Became a Catholic, Or Religio Viatoris.
