Mary Livingston King, Marchioness of Anglesey

Birth year unverified; died 1931 | American-born aristocrat and participant in expatriate society

Mary Livingston King entered British aristocratic society through marriages that contemporary directories treated as evidence of American women’s social advancement. An 1888 New York Tribune listing identifies the Marchioness of Anglesey as Mary Livingstone King, daughter of J. P. King of Georgia and widow of Henry Wodehouse. It records her marriage to Henry Paget, the fourth Marquess of Anglesey, in Paris in 1880.

The name Minnie is not a separate woman invented by the later Barney literature. The fourth marquess’s Who Was Who entry names his third wife as Minnie, daughter of J. P. King and widow of Henry Wodehouse. The National Trust’s catalogue uses Mary Minna Livingston King for the same marriage. These sources connect the formal name, a nickname, and the title, while leaving exact vital dates and the earlier family chronology to be checked. [2,3]

Her title brought her into a household associated with substantial landed property and residences in Britain and France. The 1888 listing gives a Paris residence as well as the family’s British seats. Its concern with rank, marriage, and addresses exposes what contemporary society found worth recording about a woman. It leaves much less evidence of her own decisions and activities, which require letters and property records beyond that compressed public identity.

Research by Suzanne Stroh and Samantha Pious connects Minna’s Versailles property with Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, who leased a house there. Their account also identifies Minnie as a Barney family friend and places the introduction of Natalie to Romaine Brooks at Lady Anglesey’s. That particular first-meeting date differs from other published accounts; it remains an attributed claim, not a settled chronology. Property and hospitality nevertheless supply specific routes to investigate within this expatriate circle.

Her death left an archival trace outside the literary memoirs. Bangor University’s Paget papers catalogue records documents concerning the transport of the dowager marchioness’s remains from Paris to London in 1931. The title contains an impossible birth-year sequence, so its description cannot be accepted mechanically in every detail.

Within the Constellation, Mary links American family resources, British rank, French residence, and the practical spaces in which women met and worked. Inclusion in an erotic-circle account does not establish that she was Natalie’s lover. A fuller biography must recover her independent life while maintaining that distinction.