SOURCE: "Fiction as 'the Best History of Nations': Lady Morgan's Irish Novels," in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, edited by Tom Dunne, Cork University Press, 1987, pp. 133-59.

In the following essay, Dunne defends Lady Morgan's work against charges that it is "wildly imaginative and essentially frivolous," arguing that her Irish novels combine realism with Morgan's understanding of the forces which created distinct and contrasting perceptions of Irish history.

In so far as there is a modern image of Lady Morgan, it tends to reflect that common among her contemporaries, of a rather bizarre society hostess, who wrote romantic and eccentric historical novels, all of whose heroines resembled herself, while she in turn imitated the best known of them, Glorvina of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), in terms of dress and ornamentation, and a proclivity for bringing her harp to parties. Her Irish novels, four in all...