Sydney Owenson Research Articles

Austen’s Men, Immortality and Intertextuality

Jane Austen’s men are central to her immortality and enduring appeal in the twenty-first century. This article links the intertextual imagining and re-imagining of Austen’s men with her own textual practice in the Romantic Era. Drawing on emerging methodologies for identifying and interpreting literary influence in the Romantic Era, threads of influence are established between Austen and contemporary Romantic-Era novelists, including Jane West, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Jane Porter. Reading these novelists collectively reveals a shared authorial undertaking in interrogating and rewriting masculinity through fictional genres emerging in the Romantic Era.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

<i>Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820</i>. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

Edgeworth, Owenson, and the Masculine Border

ABSTRACT This paper examines the writing of Irish national character in terms of various contemporary and contested modes of constructing masculinity in Sydney Owenson’s O’Donnel (1814) and Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond (1817). Antiquarian, chivalric, modern, cosmopolitan, reasoned, sentimental, and romanticist vectors of masculinity are examined as ideological constructions fundamentally related to various generic and formal structures deployed in each novel. The article argues ultimately that the relative invisibility of O’Donnel in the canon of the English-language novel is related to its construction of a particular type of masculinity embedded in a pointed and conscious generic promiscuity. By contrast, Edgeworth’s reception is related from the outset to both her construction of a unified realism and a very particular masculine national type, as Englishness. In conclusion, the article notes an instance of contemporary (1816) concern with working-class feminine readership as evidence of an understanding that the politics of gender and representation in the novel have real-world social effects.

“A more dreadful punishment Draco himself could not devise”: Loss of Caste in Anglo-Indian Fiction, 1790–1823

ABSTRACT In response to the activities of the Baptist and Church Missionary Societies in India, British representations of Hindu loss of caste, a supposed consequence of Christian conversion, increased in the early nineteenth century. Loss of caste, or Brahmanical excommunication, entailed a denial of family, occupation, and/or social standing among Hindus. In British discourse near the turn of the century, it transformed from a reason to prevent missions to East India Company territories into evidence for the barbarism of Hinduism, and therefore a justification for conversion. This article supplies a much-needed investigation of its importance to fictions of the British Empire. By considering loss of caste in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s The Indian Cottage (1791), Marianna Starke’s The Widow of Malabar (1796), Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), Mary Martha Sherwood’s Indian novellas, and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), this article demonstrates that loss of caste, like sati, was both a narratological trope that routinely portrayed Hinduism as severe and a significant political issue that may have helped facilitate the utilitarian shift in British colonialism near the turn of the century.

アイルランドの旅を書く女性たち:―シドニー・オーエンソンを中心として―

アイルランドの旅を書く女性たち:―シドニー・オーエンソンを中心として―

The Silence of the Land: Antiquarian Gothic and Ireland, 1790–1831

This article argues that romantic-era antiquarian writing from Ireland threatened to disclose evidence of historical violence inflicted upon the Irish by the English, and to engender retaliatory violence in the present day. Even when Irish landscapes appeared inscrutable, their impassiveness peculiarly confirmed, rather than disproved, a violent imperial past. Beginning with a consideration of Edmund Burke’s emphatic but little studied contempt for antiquarian history, the article proceeds to explore how James Hardiman sought to recuperate Ireland’s history from its forcibly erased landscapes. The essay concludes by arguing that in The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Sydney Owenson compares her Irish setting to a dizzying array of British overseas colonies and strategic holdings, so that Ireland functions as a dark mirror of insatiable imperial ambition.

“With a Knife at One’s Throat”

Padma Rangarajan, “‘With a Knife at One’s Throat’: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys” (pp. 294–317) Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827) is a silver-fork novel edged in steel: a portrait of aristocratic 1790s Dublin society that doubles as anti-imperialist jeremiad. It is also one of the earliest pieces of fiction to explicitly identify terrorism as an inevitable consequence of colonial conquest. In this essay, I demonstrate how Morgan’s novel upends the standard definition of terrorism as a singular historical rift and rewrites it as a condition of life. Modernity has no chance in Ireland, Morgan argues, if the colonial parasitism of the past continues unabated. In The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan prefigures Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of the colonized psyche by carefully detailing the psychological and material effects of symbiotic terrorism—that is, terrorism as a complex network of reciprocal, mutually constitutive violent exchanges. Intertwining the thwarted legacy of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the ongoing depredations of the Irish Ascendancy class, and her fears of an imminent revolution of the peasantry, Morgan mines Ireland’s near and distant past to forecast violence’s inevitable futurity.

A New ‘Rhetoric of Darkness’: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Connolly and the Irish Gothic

The relationship between Ireland and the Gothic goes back to the early days of the genre, when the Sublime, as identified by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, became central to the aesthetic concepts which would abound in the articulation of the Gothic as a literary form. The “dark, desolate and stormy grandeur” of the perception of Ireland which was held by the English reading public in the late eighteenth century was readily adaptable for the use of the island as a kind of pre-Enlightenment wilderness which, when combined with its linguistic, religious and cultural “otherness”, provided a fertile territory for the growth of a literature which favoured the supernatural, the uncanny and the numerous features which unite to make up the genre. As early as 1771, Elizabeth Griffin’s "The History of Lady Barton" contains elements of the Gothic, and the huge popularity of Waterford-born Regina Maria Roche’s "The Children of the Abbey"gave a definitive boost to the genre with regard to Irish writers. The success of Sydney Owenson’s "The Wild Irish Girl", and that of Charles Robert Maturin with "The Milesian Chief" and "Melmoth the Wanderer" helped foster a tradition which would be continued throughout the nineteenth century by writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, L.T. Meade and Bram Stoker. It is Le Fanu who, arguably, was the first writer to merge the Gothic with crime fiction. For Begnall, his works “oscillate between the poles of supernatural horror and suspenseful detection”, and, in short fiction such as “The Murdered Cousin” and “The Evil Guest” and novels including "Uncle Silas" and "Wylder’s Hand" Le Fanu consciously merges the emerging format of the murder mystery with the lugubrious labyrinths of the Gothic. Le Fanu’s influence was, of course, international, but the paths he trod were also followed by numerous Irish writers. One of the most successful of these is John Connolly who, since the introduction of Charlie Parker with the publication of "Every Dead Thing" in 1999 has, in the eighteen novels which have appeared to date, successfully revised the concepts and tropes which make up the Irish Gothic. In this paper these works will be analysed with reference to their debt to the Irish Gothic tradition and, most specifically, to the writing of Le Fanu.

The Wild Irish Girl Diet

Sydney Owenson’s bestselling 1806 novel, The Wild Irish Girl, not only functions as an apologia for Irish culture but also powerfully demonstrates that Ireland’s cultural heritage and production—as well as the Irish people’s hope for survival—are intimately related to Irish diet. For Owenson, Irish agriculture, often of a subsistence variety, produces and sustains Irish culture and Irish bodies. Written at a transitional point in Irish political and literary history, the novel counters agricultural reformer Arthur Young’s portrayal of Irish agriculture as the lowliest link on a chain ascending to the British state. Owenson instead focuses on the local world of peasant agriculture and the mouths it feeds, as well as the cultural production and appreciation that this agriculture sustains.

“Eloquent Eyes”: Lockean Ocularcentrism in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811)

“Eloquent Eyes”: Lockean Ocularcentrism in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811)

Staging the Revolution: Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

Staging the Revolution: Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys Matthew L. Reznicek Sydney Owenson’s place in Irish literature in the Romantic period need not be defended; her novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) remains a foundational iteration of the genre we know as the national tale. As Claire Connolly and others have shown, Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl occasioned an important cultural event that allowed its author “both the opportunity and the means to manipulate the culture market of early nineteenth-century Dublin.”1 The success of The Wild Irish Girl, Julia Wright observes, establishes the dominant pattern that shapes Owenson’s career as a novelist and gives shape to the genre of the national tale.2 The power of the national tale lies, in Ina Ferris’s words, in its “performative notion of itself: representation as less a portrayal of something than a presentation to someone.”3 In Ferris’s formulation, the national tale presents to the audience the “potential emergence of a new public,” which recalls April Alliston’s argument about the establishment of “fictional communities” that not only are imagined “as alternatives to both family and nation,” but more stridently understood to “specifically transgress and replace” those national bonds.4 This understanding of the national tale—as providing an alternative imagining of the community—raises two significant starting points that shape this argument. First, Ferris draws attention to the performativity of this representation, suggesting that the staging of the national community is powerful precisely because it enables an audience to imagine an alternative. Second, Alliston’s claims [End Page 109] regarding a transgression and replacement of the nation enables a shift in our understanding of the national tale; we can understand it participating in, and offering a cosmopolitan alternative to, the strictures of the nation-state. Highlighting the performative staging of an alternative to the nation-state calls attention to a characteristic concern shared in both Romantic national tales and in Romantic opera: the fundamental tension between “the personal sexual and affectional issues,” on the one hand, and the “setting of national struggle and ‘public duty,’” on the other.5 These twinned tensions between personal affection and public duty dominate such national tales as Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), The Missionary (1811), and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827). Similarly, in Romantic Operas like Bellini’s Norma (1831), Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Rossini’s Mosé in Egitto (1818), Tancredi (1813), L’italiana in Algeri (1813), and, most notably, Rossini’s final opera, Guillaume Tell (1829). Thematic and narrative similarities suggest that there is a relationship between novels and operas written in the early part of the nineteenth century that has, for the most part, gone unremarked upon by scholars of opera and literature. In both the Romantic national tale and the Romantic opera, there is a preoccupation with an attempt, to combine Ferris and Alliston, to present the potential alternative community based on a sympathetic relationship between the audience and the potential, transgressive alternative. This conception of a transgressive alternative mirrors the theatrical project of Denis Diderot, who argues, in his De la Poésie Dramatique (1758), that the audience “will escape the wicked men whose company they keep; . . . they will find those with whom they would live.”6 This conception of the theater “enables the formation of an idealized community,” bringing about a social alternative.7 The Romantic opera and the Romantic national tale both attempt to articulate and to stage alternative, transgressive, and cosmopolitan communities. Both of these aesthetic forms achieve this through the literary mechanism of sympathy, which in turn demands action. However, the privacy of the novel—in contrast to the shared space of the theater—ultimately troubles the polyvocal potentiality that characterises the Romantic opera’s presentation of the imagined community. [End Page 110] Notably, Owenson’s political commentary becomes more direct in her travelogues France (1817), Italy (1821), and France in 1829–30 (1830).8 Not only do these political and continental writing lay the groundwork for her final Irish...

Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

This essay argues that Sydney Owenson employs botanical imagery in her novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), to represent many facets of Irish colonialism as well as the 1800 Act of Union that formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Depicting the Irish as metaphorical plants, as food for England’s “body politic,” Owenson gestures toward a symbolic cannibalism as just one form of England’s colonial consumption of Ireland within the novel, and highlights this notion further through comparisons between the Irish peasantry and African slaves in the West Indian colonies. Melding ideas of science and sensibility, as well as natural history and national history, Owenson subtly exposes England’s exploitation of Ireland in this Act of Union.

Feminist Fancy in the National Tale: Edgeworth, Owenson, and Sarah Isdell's The Irish Recluse (1809)

This article presents a new method for characterizing the Irish national tale genre based on female union rather than the typical marriage allegory. It introduces a little-known feminist text, Sarah Isdell's The Irish Recluse (1809), then uses this text to re-examine the novels of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth, the history of absenteeism, and the Act of Union. Through its radical imagination, or fancy, The Irish Recluse idealizes feminocentric societies in order to reconceive Irish nationalism, exposing the patriarchal social order as antithetical to good governance in Ireland. Unlike other political narratives at the time, Isdell's novel argues that the problem with Ireland is its paternal, imperial structures and that women's influence would foster the best relationship between Ireland and Great Britain amidst debates on if and how they should be unified. Isdell's fictive, microcosmic Ireland envisions the perfect union through female social support rather than heterosexual marriage, resulting in a definition of Irish national identity that thrives on a matriarchal structure—a concept reiterated in Edgeworth's and Owenson's later novels. Criticism might better classify the national tale as a feminist dialectic, which emerged much earlier in history than is typically imagined.

The battle for St Peter’s chair: mediating the materials of Catholic antiquity in nineteenth-century Britain

This article explores how one object—the alleged papal throne of St Peter in the Vatican—became a battleground for Protestant and Catholic readings of the early history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. For many progressive Protestants, archaeology provided the long-sought-after scientific and material vindication of the authority of scripture. But critical analysis of scripture and historical texts could either authenticate or discredit sacred things. As tangible traces of Catholic apostolic authority, the material remains of early Roman Christianity provoked much religious, moral, and political debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article discusses how these debates were mediated in popular print and visual culture in Britain and Ireland by examining a widely publicized pamphlet debate between the English Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Although this was a debate about the theological authority exerted by the material remains of the past, the battle over Peter’s chair was conducted exclusively in the realm of word and image through exegesis and illustration.

Canals, Commerce and the Construction of Nation in Sydney Owenson’s O’Donnel

The interplay between commerce and sensibility has been well documented: commercial activity is celebrated in eighteenth-century sentimental rhetoric for its ability to incite civility, reform manners and promote virtue. In the same way, the transformative effects of commerce informed discourses of sympathy and national identity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period. This article considers Sydney Owenson’s focus on commercial improvement in post-union Ireland in her 1814 novel O’Donnel: A National Tale. As Owenson developed her formal experimentations with the national tale, she made a series of revisions to the 1812 edition of St Clair (originally published in 1803) in which she echoes contemporary political discussions about Ireland’s potential for trade through the navigation of its waterways, suggesting an emerging interest in Irish commercial progress that would go on to influence her subsequent novels. O’Donnel appraises the value of English schemes for Irish improvement in the form of canals, aqueducts and road building within the context of Enlightenment models of historical progress and sympathy. In doing so, Owenson provides an extended critique of ascendancy schemes of improvement and of the role of geography in the formation of Irish national identity, revealing a profound anxiety about both the ideological ‘mapping’ of the Irish landscape in the post-union period and the formation of international communities based on sympathetic identification.

London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek

Reviewed by: London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek Melissa J. Homestead (bio) London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850. By Joseph Rezek. ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 286. Cloth, $59.95.) Like Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadephia, 2003) and Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print: Print Culture and U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007), London and the Making of Provincial Literature is ambitious in its scope and argument and fundamentally challenges our understanding of the nation as a category of analysis in American book history of the first half of the nineteenth century. Joseph Rezek offers a bracing reorientation of the literary market in the early nineteenth century, arguing that the United States shared with Scotland and Ireland a provincial orientation toward London as a center of English-language publishing. In The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, 2004), Pascale Casonova uses Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology to argue that Paris's dominance in the early twentieth century set an aesthetic program for modernism across the globe. Rezek, also relying on Bourdieu, similarly focuses on how an orientation toward London in the "Anglophone Atlantic" by Irish, Scottish, and American authors registered at the level of aesthetics; he also argues, however, that these authors embraced the market in a search for aesthetic prestige, rather than disavowing commercial success (13). Rezek's introduction situates the dilemma of the provincial author in relation to Enlightenment aesthetic theories and defines the "aesthetics of provinciality" as a "range of representational modes" that "vacillate [End Page 555] between national and universal conceptions of art" but ultimately "takes refuge in the belief that literature enjoys an exalted role in human affairs" (15). Chapter 1 synthesizes published scholarship on the history of the book in Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and England in order to recast these histories as a heretofore unrecognized "interconnected system" with London at its center (25). After this sweeping, rapid, and highly persuasive survey of half a century in fifteen pages, in Chapter 2 Rezek zooms in for a finely grained archival case study of the complex negotiations between Edinburgh, London, and American publishers over the circulation of Walter Scott's historical novels (a version of this chapter appeared in Early American Studies in 2013). Notably, as a literary historian Rezek close reads "the language of the book trade" as "an expressive form, a means of establishing credit in business negotiations, and a performative rhetoric of the marketplace" (41). His third chapter reads novels by Irish authors Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in light of London's centripetal pull in the book trade, arguing that these authors' developing literary strategies (namely the marriage plot, travel narratives, and paratextual apparatuses) enabled them to "project an ideal relationship with English readers that downplays the otherwise vexed political intercourse between Ireland and England" (63). He turns in Chapter 4 to Washington Irving, first analyzing Irving's engagement with reprinted British texts during his two years editing the Analectic Magazine (1813–1815), and then analyzing how being taken up by London publisher John Murray for the second volume of his Sketch Book (1819–1820) spurred Irving to undertake a transformative revision of individual stories and to add and revise materials he had first written for the Analectic. The result, as Rezek argues through a fascinating close reading of revisions both large and small, is a version of the Sketch Book that differs fundamentally from Irving's initial nationalist conception in its "promot[ion of] Anglo-American literary fellowship" (102). In a somewhat disorienting move chronologically, Rezek's next chapter juxtaposes the London editions of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and Walter Scott's The Heart of the Midlothian (1818). Rezek locates in Scott's novel an allegory of its "relation to the marketplace" through the "pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London" by a central Scottish character; her journey doubled "the journey most copies of a Waverley novel took from Scott's Edinburgh printers to England for distribution" (116). Rezek finds Cooper's address to English...

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Lady Morgan (nee Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish traveller and travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogue Italy (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputation she had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl , 1806) and a socio-political writer ( France , 1817), left a mark on Italy and on the understanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helped disseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irish public opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domestic autocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve the cause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home country under her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determination concerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusual for a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’s radical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her original methods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double, feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation with apparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of society news, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting on social and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history, Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources from which she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came to obtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aim of this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’s sojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, the activities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed.