Lady Morgan Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Lady Morgan

With her typical mixture of self-deprecation and self-dramatization, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, referred to her most influential novel, The Wild Irish Girl, as a "little work" that had as its theme "circumstances of national import and national interest." In this case, the dramatization was justified. Published in 1806, The Wild Irish Girl brought both the wrongs and the glories of Ireland before the ordinary English reader in accessible form. Despite some literary deficiencies, the novel catapulted Owenson to a celebrity that lasted three decades, making her one of the major early spokespeople for the Irish cause. That she is so little known in the twentieth century is paradoxically a tribute to her success in her own time. Lady Morgan's combination of politics and literary popularity made her so potentially dangerous a figure that she was vilified in the establishment press, a medium whose verdicts usually dictate lasting reputations. These verdicts, coupled with Lady Morgan's no-longer-fashionable sentimental style, have relegated her to that most marginal of literary categories, "Lesser Writers." But her fiction, essays, and travel writings, which combine conventional literary trappings with shrewd political and social insights, show Lady Morgan to have had more ability and intelligence than history has accorded her.

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