The Wild Irish Girl
Diminutive in stature, Lady Morgan
(1775?-1859) was an outsized personality and for several decades a commanding
presence on the literary scene. Sydney Owenson, as she then was, is remembered as
the author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), an innovative national tale
written in response to the 1800 Act of Union. While her Irish fiction was popular,
so also were her accounts of her travels, France, 2 vols (1817) and
Italy, 2 vols (1821), and the essays she contributed to the New
Monthly Magazine and other periodicals. She was very much a professional
woman of letters, publishing in all the major genres: poetry, drama, essays,
biography, and history. She was fiercely independent and proud of the comfortable
living she earned by her writings. In the course of a long and eventful life she
came to know many notable persons, making her Memoirs a rich source of
information about literary and public life in the early nineteenth century.
It is one of the more substantial
life-and-letters volumes. In her later years Lady Morgan began work on an
autobiography; as her eyesight failed she took on the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury
(1812–1880) as an amanuensis. Miss Jewsbury assisted with An Odd Volume
extracted from an Autobiography (1859) and also with the posthumous
Memoirs (1862). While the latter volume is often attributed to Lady
Morgan's literary executor, William Hepworth Dixon (1821–1879), it would appear
from his preface that while he was responsible for seeing the book through the
press she transcribed the letters and wrote the biographical passages.
The object, he says, was to allow
Lady Morgan to “tell her own story in her own way.” This is both good
and bad: Lady Morgan left a more complete set of materials than usually went into a
life-and-letters: an autobiographical fragment covering her childhood and youth,
extensive correspondence including many of her own letters, and a fragmentary
journal sporadically covering the second half of her life. But Jewsbury and Dixon
seem to have underestimated the labor required to make a book out of it all,
supplying little in the way of narrative connection, misdating letters, and leaving
many names garbled, ambiguous, or otherwise unintelligible (Lady Morgan's
handwriting was notoriously bad). A second edition (1863) was hastily issued to
correct some of the transcription errors. Either as a result of Lady Morgan's own
intentions or from carelessness on the part of her executors, much is included that
more scrupulous editors would have toned down or excised.
Sydney Morgan had a hard-scrabble
childhood. Her father, Robert Owenson, was an actor and theater manager who
unaccountably married an English evangelical Christian who had little use for
actors or Irishness. In the Owenson family it was feast or famine, Irish folkways
and fecklessness alternating with English moralizing and reform. Lady Morgan loved
Ireland but once pensioned was happy to abandon Dublin for London's fashionable
West End. She was a stout defender of the Irish populace who liked nothing better
than to hobnob with Lords Lieutenant and socialize with the Castle gentry. It is
not difficult to see the impact of her parents on her adult character: by contrary
examples she learned the virtue of tolerance from her mother and from her father
the value of prudence. Both fostered her love of family and the finer things in
life. Her unfinished memoir is a profoundly suggestive if elliptical reflection on
her complex social origins.
It can be deliberately
elusive, as when she studiously presents herself as a decade younger than she in
fact was—vanity being one of her prime characteristics—or when she
carefully avoids any mention of the traumatic events of 1798. “What has a
woman to do with dates?” she writes (1:6): “I have no reason to
complain of memory; I find in my efforts to track its records, guided by the fond
feelings of my life, and warmed by the fancifulness of my Celtic temperament,
bright hues come forward like the colours of the tesselated pavement of antiquity
when the renovating water is flung upon them” (1:2). Thus her attitude
towards things past; in her letters—concerned with times present—one
observes a calculating and manipulative personality of the Becky Sharp variety.
The first volume recounts her rise
from impoverished schoolgirl to governess to lady's companion to successful
novelist; it concludes with a long series of love-letters exchanged with her future
husband, Thomas Charles Morgan, a seraphic materialist with magnetic powers not
unlike her own. If these letters emulate Werter and the Nouvelle
Heloise in their romantic postures, Sydney of the many suitors was by then
(1811) of an age when it was time to be practical about marriage. She seems to have
extracted a Irish knighthood and government position for her English husband as a
condition of surrendering her independent status. The by-all-accounts happy
marriage extended her intellectual and geographical horizons: the Morgans traveled
in Europe, collaborated on books, and acquired an international reputation.
They were ardent Whigs determined
to cultivate the reformist legacy of the French Revolution. Lady Morgan adored the
Bonapartes and all connected with them, at every opportunity reprobating the
British Government and its Continental allies. She became an Irish Leigh Hunt and
was treated accordingly by the Tory press, particularly the Quarterly
Review. This seems only to have enhanced her reputation, and by the 1820s the
Morgans were respected members of the Whig establishment pushing for Catholic
Emancipation in Ireland and political reform in England. Byron admired Lady
Morgan's book on Italy, as well he might; she even anticipated him as a supporter
of modern Greece in her novel Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809). Lady Morgan's
Irish nationalism was tempered by a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan outlook. From the
beginning her literary models had been European: Goethe, Rousseau, de Genlis,
DeStael. She imitated French epistolary styles, intellectual attitudes, and social
manners and was consequently mocked for her vulgarity, impiety. and bad French.
Lady Morgan's correspondence
leaves the impression that she pursued literature chiefly as a means of gaining
access to the rich and powerful. Allusions to books and writers are few in
proportion to the long lists of aristocrats and social events. She did not slight
her profession—quite the contrary—but she regarded writing in an
instrumental light. She wrote for money and prestige, and as the letters and
journals indicate, for all her love of fine flattery she had an acute understanding
of the literary marketplace as such. Her books were topical and thus short-lived,
but always timely. Her correspondence with her cagey publishers, Sir Richard
Phillips and Henry Colburn, is one of the highlights of the Memoirs.
One writer she did take an
interest in was Byron. They never met but had many associates in common, notably
Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Morgan admired Byron
while he was alive and cherished his memory when he was dead; she was deeply
distressed when she lost a locket given to her by Teresa Guiccioli containing a
lock of his hair. Caroline Lamb was of particular interest to Lady Morgan, not only
for the connection to Byron but because the Ponsonby's were an important Irish
family. They met socially as early as 1811 but were closest in the 1820s. When Lady
Caroline's marriage dissolved she turned to Lady Morgan for support and advice, and
bequeathed to her the precious portrait of Byron. Lady Morgan reciprocated by
taking down Lady Caroline's account of her affair with Byron, one of the more
important documents in the Memoirs. The kindly interest Lady Morgan took in
his wayward wife may have influenced Lord Melbourne's later decision to grant her a
pension.
Reviews of the Memoirs were
mixed: Lady Morgan was a polarizing figure even in death. The hostile dissection in
Fraser's (February 1863) is required reading, for it was written by
someone much better acquainted with Lady Morgan's Irish millieu than Jewsbury or
Dixon. Some reviews were mildly condescending, while others admired Lady Morgan for
her frank acknowledgments of her faults, a characteristic that seems to have been
part of her charisma, as it had once been of Rousseau's.
While the Memoirs lacks the
literary brilliance of Moore's Byron or Lockhart's Scott the
experience of reading it complete can be moving. One marvels at young
“Glorvina's” ability to overcome obstacles, at the range of people she
knew and scenes she witnessed in maturity, at the insatiable zest for life she
carried into old age. Lady Morgan was a worldly, calculating woman who had studied
the correspondence of French courtiers and courtesans to good effect, but that
aspect of her character was balanced by an obviously sincere and selfless love for
her family and political causes. Though a professed feminist she did not much care
for the society of women (so she says), preferring the attentions of ambitious
young men. Her scarcely concealed jealousy of the Duchess of St. Albans (the Irish
actress who married a peer half her age) and unwillingness to be seen in the
company of old Samuel Rogers (memento mori) can seem oddly endearing.
She wrote to Alicia LeFanu in
1803, “I am ambitious, far, far beyond the line of laudable
emulations, perhaps beyond the power of being happy. Yet the strongest
point of my ambition is to be every inch a woman” (1:230). That she
was.
David Hill
Radcliffe
