“GREATLY ALTERED”: THE LIFE OF SYDNEY OWENSON'S INDIAN NOVEL

Abstract

In the last months of her life, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) returned to one of her earliest and most popular works,The Missionary: An Indian Tale(1811), and devoted time between attacks of severe bronchitis to revising it. The revised novel was published in 1859 under the name ofLuxima, the Prophetess: A Tale of India. According to the unattributed preface toLuximait was “greatly altered,” receiving the final touches only a few days before Owenson's death on April 16, 1859 (Luximaiii; preface). The revisions are extensive. Most prominent of all is the excision of tracts of particularly purple prose, and the reining in of some of the elements that markThe Missionaryas a novel of sensibility. These changes were considered prudent even in 1811: an otherwise complimentary notice onThe MissionaryinCritical Reviewurges the author to “divest her style of its luxuriant redundancies, and to write in a more simple and natural manner.” Another reviewer styled the novel “outrageously romantic” (qtd. inMissionary298). Yet despite recent critical consensus that Owenson's 1859 revisions were for the most part cosmetic, it seems unlikely that in her death throes Owenson spent sleepless nights worrying about lukewarm reviews of a novel she had written over forty years earlier.