Sydney Owenson Research Articles

Is There a Bull in This Nation? On Maria Edgeworth’s Nationalism

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES MARIA EDGEWORTH HAS BEEN RECOVERED for the history of British novels as the inaugurator of the Irish national tale, a sub-genre that facilitated the tradition's transformation in the early nineteenth century. The strand of Edgeworth studies that has affected this shift importantly connects her political and aesthetic interests, making visible her contribution to the literary tradition within which she worked. It also, however, continues to accord Edgeworth a peripheral status--either on account of the marginality of the sub-genre she shaped and that limited her work, or on account of the liminality of her political views: a liberal nationalist, Edgeworth is usually understood to be stranded in limbo between Enlightenment projects and Romantic sentiments. In Ina Ferris' The Achievement of Literary Authority, for example, the national tale enables a move from an ahistorical universalist conception of man and society (that she believes dominates eighteenth-century novels), to a recognition of cultural heterogeneity and of historical process (that she sees as key to Romantic counter-Enlightenment). Edgeworth, she explains, inaugurates the national tale with Castle Rackrent (1800), where she presents the story of three generations of Irish landlords narrated by one of their servants--Thady Quirk--complete with his specific dialect, pronunciations, and idioms, and framed by a preface, explanatory footnotes, and a glossary by an English editor. But Ferris proceeds to focus on the way in which early nineteenth-century reviewers marginalized Edgeworth, and since Ferris' main concern here is to explain Scott's rise to literary authority, she does not question the hierarchy that these reviewers established. Nonetheless, the reasoning for Edgeworth's marginalization chronicled by her is especially revealing, insofar as it sets up the national tale as an imperfect (inferior, marginal) example of a novel. Edgeworth's work, these early nineteenth-century reviewers argued, is too domestic and evinces insufficient knowledge of, and discomfort with, public discourse (by contrast with Scott, who confidently incorporates official trans-national history into his narratives); additionally, Edgeworth's characters lack emotional individuation, a result of what reviewers saw as her eschewal of feeling (again in contrast with Scott, who endows his characters with a more complete subjectivity). (1) Thus, insofar as the national tale focuses on local (national) history and typical (national) character, it fails to measure up to the more global attitudes (towards social relations as well as towards personality) that the British novelistic tradition manifests at its best. (2) If Ferris credits Edgeworth with rejecting Enlightenment universalism, Katie Trumpener suggests that the extent of her rejection is insufficient; this, in Trumpener's account, makes Edgeworth's national tales peripheral to the work of her compatriots. Trumpener argues that Edgeworth's novels successfully criticize early nineteenth-century travel narratives that import an ostensibly universal standard of measurement into a landscape of great historical and cultural complexity. (3) At the same time, however, these novels continue to embrace the progressive and utilitarian concerns of Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland (of the 1770s) and thus fail to offer a full critique of Enlightenment reason. Other early nineteenth-century Irish authors, such as Sydney Owenson and Charles Maturin, tie Enlightenment reason with English imperialism, and criticize this combination with a cultural nationalism founded on the irreconcilability of local specifics and abstract systems. In such novels the territory-topos symbolizes a combination of local material conditions and past intellectual achievements, and is used to differentiate a local heritage, to mobilize sentimental attachments to this heritage, and to interpellate readers for traditionalist values. …

Mme de Staël’s Cosmopolitan Imaginary and Sydney Owenson’s Early Novels

Sydney Owenson’s early novels, The Wild Irish Girl: a National Tale (1806), Woman or: Ida of Athens (1809) and The Missionary: an Indian Tale (1811), displace the question of imperialist violence onto the narration of a passionate albeit contentious romantic encounter between a privileged colonial male traveller and a colonised, indigenous woman. This paper argues that her manipulation of the Romance trope and construction of “national character” (which is comparable to the way Mme De Staël creates her fictional heroines) inscribe a dynamic, productive tension between discourses of nationalism, universalism and cosmopolitanism.

Text and Textile in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

Text and Textile in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl Julie Donovan (bio) Over the last decade and a half, Sydney Owenson’s 1806 novel The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale has attracted a substantial body of criticism—more than any other item in Owenson’s oeuvre.1 While acknowledging this work and the possible peril of wild Irish girl fatigue, this essay intervenes in the current array of readings by demonstrating how Owenson’s text reflects her materialist thinking. Though she often presented herself and was viewed as the epitome of a hopelessly frothy Romantic nationalism communing with the spirit of the Celts, Sydney Owenson was a serious materialist.2 [End Page 31] She traced this philosophical bias to the precocity of her younger years: “before I was fourteen,” she wrote in her autobiographical memoir, The Book of the Boudoir (1829), “I had read Locke (which chance threw my way in a parlour window).” Maintaining that “No sophism, however difficult of detection, can supersede the sensible conviction of external reality,” Owenson, with cheerful derision, challenged the validity of Idealism over matter expounded by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley: “Berkeley himself did not run his head against a post” (1.47; 1.III).3 This preoccupation with materialism manifests itself in The Wild Irish Girl as Owenson’s narrative interweaves Irish history with the physical world of material objects—primarily textiles and clothing. Sustained tropes around such items in Owenson’s third work of fiction become instrumental in reupholstering Ireland’s degraded national image, providing the means for a sophisticated re-appropriation of Britain’s image of its own imperial might and Ireland’s backwardness. Clothing and textiles provide a kind of master trope for such a re-appropriation and transformation, not only because Owenson interpreted them as intrinsic to conceptions of Irish corporeality and subjecthood, but also because of their very material nature—their ability to be circulated and exchanged, re-stitched and refashioned. What [End Page 32] enthralls Owenson about those material items is not so much their physicality, but their workability—the ways in which they are malleable, portable, and transformable—workable as much by maverick Irish writers as by British imperialists. In exploring materiality in The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson ranges widely, but she begins from two starting points. She uses her country’s historical prowess in textile manufacture to demonstrate how Ireland could take its place as part of Europe and the world rather than linger as a lesser dominion of Britain. Additionally, she takes as a context resistance against inequitable restraints on Ireland’s textile industry. As voiced by Jonathan Swift through to the Earl of Charlemont, leader of the Irish Volunteers in 1782, such resistance commandeered campaigns to buy Irish textiles and to wear domestically produced clothes. Always cognizant of the evolving historical struggles of Ireland’s textile trade, Owenson reflects on colonial proscriptions against “native” attire, romantically reinvents ideas of ancient dress associated with rebellion, and interprets antiquarian lore through clothing. As a post–1800 Act of Union novel inhabiting a world in which strictures on free trade have been lifted, The Wild Irish Girl focuses attention more on cultural than economic concerns. Owenson, however, perceived points of contiguity between the two, a perception exemplified most dramatically by her deployment of clothing and textiles to purvey the Celtic chic of The Wild Irish Girl’s heroine, Glorvina. In adopting that character’s Celtic dress as part of a self dramatization after writing the national tale, Owenson fused her public self-fashioning with her encouragement of the Irish textile industry. The Wild Irish Girl not only thematizes the task of re-working materials, it concretely performs that task, weaving the old—voluminous footnotes and intertexts—with a new story line. These Owenson incorporates into her narrative not to channel British cultural authority, but rather to critique and transform it, as she interlaces historical and social context for tropes around textiles and clothing with character development in her narrative—notably the re-education of the novel’s protagonist, Horatio Mortimer—whom, unlike Berkeley, she forces to “run his head against a post” of tangible Irish life. Refuting accusations that Owenson’s copious...

Ambivalent Realism: May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor"

Ambivalent Realism:May Laffan's "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" Jill Brady Hampton It is probably true to say that few contemporary scholars of Irish literature have heard of May Laffan (1849–1916), let alone read her works. It is also true that any scholar with even a cursory knowledge of present-day debates in Irish literature would be aware of ongoing discussions concerning which writers are, and are not, to be considered part of the "canon"—a debate that grew contentious after the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991.1 Recent studies of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, particularly of women's contributions, have invigorated the recovery of once-neglected Irish writers. Scholars have recognized the importance of such early Irish authors as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, William Carleton, and the Banim brothers. They also have heralded writers from later in the century including Charles Lever, Charles Kickham, George Moore, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martyn (Ross). Research on Thomas Moore retains a vigorous presence in the scholarly literature; oddly, Charles Kickham, the author of Knocknagow —among the most popular and influential of all nineteenth-century novels in English—still fails to attract much attention.2 Widely lauded in the 1870s and 1880s, May Laffan, too, fell into obscurity until fairly recently. [End Page 127] For students of nineteenth-century Ireland never to read the biting satire of May Laffan would be unfortunate. In The Cabinet of Irish Literature (1883), an ambitious early attempt to represent a canon of Irish writing over four volumes, editors Charles Read and T. P. O'Connor (later a prominent Home Rule politician) recognized her distinctive contribution: Miss Laffan is to some extent the precursor of a new school of Irish fiction . . . she deserves the highest praise for the courage and remarkable skill with which she has exposed some of the shams and the narrowness that deface the society of Ireland as of every other country. Her writings in this respect mark unquestionably a new era in Irish literature.3 Read and O'Connor's praise raises questions about both the current Irish literary canon and nineteenth-century writing. They may, of course, have simply been wrong in their judgment; but it may also be that the scholarly neglect of Laffan and other, equally significant, writers provides insight into both nineteenth and twentieth-century critical judgments, and that she, too, warrants a place in the canon. Laffan's acclaimed short story "Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor" (1879), an exemplar of Irish literary social realism and penetrating satire, makes the case compelling.4 In 1979, Robert Lee Wolff 's editing of Garland's Ireland: From the Act of Union—1800 to the Death of Parnell—1891 sparked interest in Irish fiction outside the Revival.5 Notably, Wolff was a professor of history, not literature. In acknowledging literature's value as an historical source, Wolff commented that "above all, it was the novelists who taught the reading public about nineteenth-century Ireland. It is the novelists who if given the chance can still today outdo the scholars in teaching us in the late twentieth century about Ireland in the nineteenth."6 Including Laffan, the Garland collection presented a new perspective on Irish Catholic middle-class life, which recent research has further [End Page 128] developed.7 John V. Kelleher, Wolff 's colleague at Harvard, also testified to the value of the Garland collection: But to declare that most of it lacked seriousness showed either that those who leveled the charge had only a few of the lighter books in mind or, more likely, that the Ireland they knew was so changed from what it had been even a few decades earlier that they could have little comprehension of what the older writers had struggled with and tried to express.8 Kelleher also emphasized the helpful information, perceptive observation, and intelligent comment on nineteenth-century Ireland offered by the collected fiction. Born in Dublin, May Laffan was the product of a denominationally mixed marriage, a rarity in the highly sectarian Ireland of the time where religion fostered mental, social, and cultural ghettoes. Her mother, Ellen Sarah, neé Fitzgibbon...

Traveling Pleasures and Perils of Sensibility

philosophical investment in pleasures of sympathy--especially if represented as contagious--provides a continuity between traditions of Sensibility and of Romanticism. To illustrate, I pair two blockbusters of first decade of nineteenth-century, Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) and Germaine de Stael's Corinne, or Italy (1807). Together they offer a perspective on moments of cultural encounter, on pleasures and perils of Sensibility that animate cultural polities of both works. Both novels function partly as travel books introducing intense, destabilizing pleasures of foreign locales, customs, and traditions to critique domestic political circumstances. But for these women writers (and in different ways for female protagonists at center of novels) notion of home is vexed itself. Tensions produced by distance, displacement, discomfort, and sometimes even by divided allegiance, add complexity to subtle and implicit nationalist critique their narratives enable. Owenson conveys her competing allegiances to Ireland and England after Union of 1800 both through marriage plot uniting characters and nations in conclusion to Wild Irish Girl and in her insistent equation of national with natural, especially for natives of wild western region of Connaught. De Stael's familiar homelessness, constantly displaced by Napoleon's dictates of exile, is reflected by a geographically diverse and thorough immersion in Italian landscape and culture, past and present. Both novels distrust excesses of nationalism while imagining cross-cultural love relationships animated by extreme states of sympathetic attachment to people, places, and objects that are master tropes of Sensibility. Ultimately, pleasure in both novels engenders a volatile notion of history that embraces pleasures of historical change and transcends its inevitable pains. Owenson's embrace of futurity in a revolutionary era in contrast with de Stael's fatalism distinguishes two novels. In literature of Sensibility, electric charge of human contact provides more than simple pleasure. Moments of literal contact arouse one's own physiology and sensitivity to other beings: hence, fellow-feeling. Such moments of imagined sociability follow from a heightened ethical imperative to connect with others, often at one's own peril. Typically, in a Sternean mode, touching scenes in Wild Irish Girl foreground eroticized benevolence between characters which Owenson frames with Gaelic symbolic significance. For example, when fingers of hero and heroine accidentally meet on harp Glorvina is playing, Horatio comments, The touch circulated like electricity through every vein, breeding (Owenson 66). Both trope of circulation and unaccountable emotion protagonist experiences (while assuming it is shared by both parties) express Sensibility tradition. This excitement is less than utter delirium of an earlier scene, but beyond power of words--a commonplace of eighteenth-century tradition that, would be retooled through Romantic versions of sublime. This interchange is also significant in introducing a key interruption in narrative, an extended chain of footnoted material which discusses antiquity of harp and distinctive Gaelic tradition of itinerant bard, while citing Percy's Reliques, introducing Brian Boru and Cambrensis, and drawing (as notes so often do) on author's personal experience of Ireland--the author as native informant. specific linkage of Gaelic culture with tradition of Sensibility provides a necessary corrective to critical narratives that root Sensibility within a primarily British cultural framework, while nodding to French and German influences. As several critics have noted, this reduction ignores increasing identification of Sensibility with the Celtic fringe (Eagleton; Alliston). …

Disability, Ireland, and The Wild Irish Girl

Using the work of Lennard Davis and other scholars in disability studies as a base, this essay attempts to read Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl through the category of modern disability. In this investigation a link is discovered between the representations of physical difference and the larger political framework of nation or the notion of “Ireland.” By grounding this connection in the context of the national tale, the essay first demonstrates that the vision of Owenson’s novel involves a transformative reading by the British public, a reading that will hopefully lead to a re‐casting of the Irish character. In this argument, however, this easy link between nation and character is rigorously re‐evaluated through the character of the Prince. In focusing on the Prince, this essay shifts the tradition paradigm of reading the novel away from the two other primary characters in the text, Glorvina, the Prince’s only daughter, and Horatio Mortimer, the narrative’s English protagonist. And in the end the character of the Prince is discovered to represent a bridge that links the concepts of Ireland and invalidism (or disability) together into a single, ultimately negative representation.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction James S. Donnelly Ver Kreilkamp Often in an issue organized without a predetermined focus, contributions by scholars from different disciplines enrich each other's perspectives, testifying once again to the serendipitous value of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary publication. In this issue of Éire-Ireland, two essays, one by a historian and the other by a literary scholar, examine responses to enduring social and political problems facing Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. Roisín Higgins investigates how state planning for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising reflected a series of national anxieties—the survival of partition, the languishing role of the Irish language, the continuing scourge of heavy emigration—that led to an "undercurrent of uncertainty and ambivalence" surrounding the 1966 commemoration. This ambivalence, argues Higgins, resulted in attempts to disavow for the postwar world any reminders, now termed "anti-modern," of the violent political nationalism that had accompanied the formation of a small sovereign state in the 1916–21 period. In a very different sort of essay, one examining high culture rather than popular commemoration and the working out of state policy, James Matthew Wilson suggests how the mid-century poetry of Denis Devlin reflected a related anxiety about Ireland in the decades since independence. Wilson reads Devlin's theologically inflected modernist political poems as this Irish poet/diplomat's response to the continuing failure of the small Irish nation-state to assert genuine sovereignty in the postwar world. [End Page 4] Through new research and interpretation several essays in this issue challenge accepted historical or literary assumptions. James Donnelly investigates the Rockite movement, a sustained outburst of extreme agrarian violence in the early 1820s. He concludes that although the Rockites gave primacy to the claims of local inhabitants, the movement nevertheless constituted a major regional agrarian revolt exhibiting many supralocal features. Promulgating laws intended to supersede parliamentary statutes even while asserting their loyalty to the king and constitution, the Rockites also expressed nationalistic, sectarian, and anti-English sentiments. In another essay interrogating received opinion, Raphael Ingelbien turns to Sydney Owenson's last novel, The Princess, or the Béguine (1835), to undermine the assumption that with the advent of Daniel O'Connell's repeal campaign in the 1830s, Irish writers revealed their essential conservatism by turning against their own country as a subject for fiction. Calling attention to the affinities that Owenson (Lady Morgan) found between a liberal post-revolutionary European nation like Belgium and O'Connell's Ireland, Ingelbien argues for a reassessment of her political trajectory by demonstrating that in a late work set outside Ireland, this novelist continued to advance a liberal agenda for her own nation. Keri Walsh's study of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction written in the 1930s and 1940s implicitly challenges a more familiar reading of that writer as a conservative Big House novelist. In "Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist," Walsh instead views Bowen as an innovative cosmopolitan, experimenting with the avant-garde techniques of European modernists in order to forge her own distinctive literary style. Caleb Richardson, however, confirms the accepted view of an inward-looking Ireland during the 1940s as he explores a culture retreating into defensive isolation during the World War II era of the "Emergency." In his analysis of the 1942 Senate debate surrounding the censorship of Eric Cross's The Tailor and Ansty, Richardson makes abundantly clear that in the very period when Bowen (and other Irish cultural modernists) were looking beyond Ireland for inspiration, key national figures were preoccupied with protecting the country from what one senator termed the foreign "floodgates of filth." Two essays in this issue engage with the creation of symbolic political spectacle in Ireland. Such historical displays, increasingly [End Page 5] reported in newspapers, influenced public opinion and provided enduring imagery whereby the state or its opponents sought to impress vivid ideological meanings in situations of intense political conflict. Padhraig Higgins examines the growing role of popular commemorative events enabling Irish Protestants during the Volunteer movement of the late 1770s and early 1780s...

The Textualizing of Sound: Romantic-Period Pseudo-Songs

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Textualizing of Sound: Romantic-Period Pseudo-SongsTerence HoagwoodTerence Hoagwood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 38, Number 3Summer 2007The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Meeting, 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045131 Views: 4Total views on this site © 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (review)

Reviewed by: The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland Sharon Alker (bio) Ina Ferris. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. x+205pp. US$85. ISBN 0-521-81460-X. The national tale, as a genre, emerged as an object of literary study in the 1990s in the work of such critics as Katie Trumpener, Mary Jean Corbett, Miranda Burgess, and Ina Ferris. Despite its relatively recent appearance, its significance in the configuration of cross-border relations has been clearly established. Katie Trumpener, in "National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806–1830" (ELH 60, no. 3 [1993]: 685–731), introduced the national tale as an "allegorical presentation of the contrast, attraction, and union between disparate cultural worlds" (697) that seeks "not only to reflect but to direct national sentiment" (689). Burgess, in "Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland, 1796–1806" (MLQ 59, no. 1 [1998]: 33–70), has analysed the manifestations of violence that rupture the move towards resolution in the proto-national tale. Corbett, in Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing (2000), has demonstrated that allegories of union, such as those present in the national tale, did not merely originate from subordinated nations, noting that "a liberal English discourse [was] dedicated to producing ideological fictions through which Irish disaffection from English rule could be rhetorically minimized, managed, or resolved" (4). Ferris herself has been a vital part of this critical conversation. In "Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale" (Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 [1996]: 287–303 ), she introduces the "shock of cultural encounter" that she substantially develops in her astute and valuable book, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (295). Ferris's book is the first full-length scholarly work that dissects and examines the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish national tale. It offers a rich and deeply historicized analysis of the genre's trajectory, from its origin in forms that include the travel narrative and the romance, through its complication by impulses that disturb its cross-border focus, such as the desire to mediate women's position in the nation, to its final decay under [End Page 227] the pressures of historical forces in the turbulent 1820s. In chapter 1, Ferris delineates the origins of the national tale, paying close attention to the late eighteenth-century travel narrative, in particular the Irish tour, a loose "magpie genre" in which the traveller stands firmly outside his object of study (43). While the national tale certainly emulates the form, she notes, it also satirizes it, and works to complicate and destabilize the representation of the traveller-figure. Chapter 2 explores this disturbance in detail, noting, for example, that in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl (1806), the derogatory account of the Anglo-Irish traveller Horatio's encounter with a small boy and a pig is ruptured by a footnote that offers a competing reading. This paratextual intervention dislodges colonial hierarchies and impels English readers to reconsider their reading of cross-border relations. The national tale, in its original form, seems to centre on a quest for cross-border amelioration through the acquisition of sympathy, but Ferris ably demonstrates that we must be cautious in determining precisely how sympathy manifests itself in the genre. The model of sympathy deployed by such authors as Edgeworth and Owenson, she suggests, is not that of Adam Smith, who emphasized concord and the elimination of unquiet emotions. The case of Ireland, with its layers of dissonance, not only between Britain and Ireland, but also between the Anglo-Irish and the Irish, does not allow for such a model. Rather, Ferris reads the national tale through Humean concepts of sympathy that privilege discomfort rather than stability and equilibrium. Indeed, it is the seeds of negativity within the original form, Ferris implies, that enable it to evolve into a novel of insurgency. This notion of sympathy frequently becomes visible in the experience of the encounter between the traveller and the Irish, which is often a jarring one that seeks to disrupt and alter the consciousness of the...

"Passion's Empire": Sydney Owenson's "Indian Venture," Phoenicianism, Orientalism, and Binarism

I have at last, waded through your Oriental Library, and it is impossible you can ever feel weight of obligation I owe you, except you turn author, and some kind friend supplies you with rare books that give sanction of authority to your own wild and visions. Your histories place me upon fairy you know I love to tread, nothing is but what is not, and you have contributed so largely and efficiently to my venture, that you have right to share in profits, and claim to be considered silent in firm. (1) ********** THUS SYDNEY OWENSON, IN AN UNDATED LETTER TO HER CLOSE FRIEND and former lover, Dublin barrister Sir Charles Ormsby, acknowledged her debt to a silent partner in her textual of The Missionary, novel which was to receive four London editions and New York edition in its year of publication. (2) The narratives of history and fiction operate in productive symbiosis: each can rewrite other. The implicit contrasts between bulky quarto tomes and aerial lightness of her imagination, between the fairy ground of sentimental novel and commercial realities of book production exemplify polarized ambiguities apparent not only in this work but throughout Sydney Owenson's life and career. Such ambiguities were complicated by confusing contemporary cross-currents of ideology and class. The financial transactions of her Indian venture were completed not in Leadenhall Street headquarters of East India Company but in even more august surroundings of Foreign Office, where her publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, somewhat overawed by presence of Secretary of State for War and Colonies, purchased manuscript of The Missionary; A, Tale for sum of four hundred pounds. Viscount Castlereagh, architect of 1800 Act of Union by which Ireland's Parliament had voted itself out of existence, was, according to Percy Bysshe Shelley, more often accompanied by seven bloodhounds than Jacobin novelists, and story of how this wild Irish patriot, republican sympathizer and radical slut came to be sitting at ease, negotiating sale of her latest improbable vision in his Cabinet Office, is in many respects worthy of one of Owenson's own fictions. (3) In politicizing her sentimental discourse, she adapted an old tradition which had figured colonized Ireland as woman, such as Kathleen Ni Houlihan or Roisin Dubh, oppressed or sexually exploited. Her adaptation incorporated time-honoured romance trope of transformative encounter by which handsome and prejudiced young protagonist/colonizer is subjected to romantic initiation with beautifully representative muse of an alien land. Sexuality transcends and transgresses cultural boundaries and ethnic seduction could be vicariously relished by novel-reading public who were simultaneously instructed in Gaelic traditions by means of elaborate footnotes. Her readers were encouraged to engage if not in sexual tourism then in heavily eroticized cultural tourism, and appeal of this formula might be extended far beyond colonial Ireland to colonized Greece in Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), or further east to colonized India. Sydney Owenson launched herself into troubled waters of Orientalism as easily as she might take dip in Bantry Bay. It was all question of origins; and for Owenson Gaelic culture had its origins in Orient. In this light, Ireland was not only Britain's first colony, but also her first Oriental colony, and Owenson frequently represented Ireland in Oriental tropes. When Glorvina's preceptor, redoubtable Father John, in his defense of priority of third-century Irish bardic legends of Oisin, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill, announced: For Ireland, owing to its being colonized from Phoenicia, and consequent early introduction of letters there, was at that period esteemed most enlightened country in Europe, he was airing contemporary theory of Irish Phoenicianism with its piquant fusion of Orientalist and Celtic exoticism. …

Irish fiction: an introduction

Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, Irish Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre. Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field. A glossary of terms. An annotated, critical reading list. This book offers students, writers, and serious fans a window into some of the most popular topics, styles and periods in this subject. Authors studied in Irish Fiction include: Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, John and Michael Banim, Gerald Griffin, William Carleton, Charles Lever, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Somerville, Violet Martin, George Moore, James Stephens, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Francis Stuart, Brian Moore, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Jennifer Johnston, Roddy Doyle, John McGahern, John Banville, Eoin McNamee, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue

Sydney owenson's wild indian girl

In 1811, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) published a novel set in India, The Missionary: An Indian Tale, arguably the first Irish Orientalist text. If, as Madeline Dobie has recently argued, the discourse of Orientalism in France was used to avoid moral questions about colonialism and slavery, Owenson used the genre in order to confront the brutalities of British colonialism. Owenson's intertextuality drew on not only other works about the east, but also her own literary productions and experience of authorship as an Irish woman of undistinguished background performing for an imperial audience. As she did in The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, her first publishing success, in The Missionary Owenson exploits just those equivalences imperialism posits among its peripheries. This essay examines The Missionary's intervallic position between the Irish novels The Wild Irish Girl and O’Donnel, and its possible role in the oft-noted shift in Owenson's practice of textualist history.

The Seductive Masquerade of the Wild Irish Girl

A cursory reading of Sydney Owenson' s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is likely to generate some reasonable disappointment. Its muddling of genres, excessive footnoting, and non-linear narrative emphat...

"Eternally disunited": Gender, Empire, and Epistemology in Sydney Owenson's "The Missionary"

Previous articleNext article No Access"Eternally disunited": Gender, Empire, and Epistemology in Sydney Owenson's "The Missionary"Kathryn FreemanKathryn Freeman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 36, Number 1Winter 2005Romantic Antiquities: Papers delivered at NASSR, 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044992 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reasons to Remember Sydney Owenson

AbstractA marble bust of Sydney Owenson (?1776–1859, known as Lady Morgan after her marriage in 1812) is one of the images included in a current exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, running from 9 March to 19 June 2005, entitled ‘Conquering England’: Ireland in Victorian London. Owenson's inclusion in the exhibit recognizes her significant role as part of an influential Irish cultural presence in nineteenth‐century Britain – in her case one that spanned the Romantic and Victorian periods.

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland?s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.

The Big House: Space, Place, and Identity in Irish Fiction

How does Irish fiction stand out as being Irish? Irish novels are markedly Irish?from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), first truly Irish novel1 to recent fiction of Maeve Binchy and Niall Williams. On many occasions Ireland itself is presented as a character in text, as in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914)? where Dublin and its people stand for whole of Ireland, enhanced by detail and exactness of Dublin sites, streets, and characters. In his 1988 critical history of Irish novel, James M. Cahalan points out that the Big House novel was most popular and enduring subgenre within Irish novel, except for Irish historical novel.2 What is clear is that these fic tions could not be set anywhere else; action must take place in Ireland. With both these genres emphasis falls upon Irish element?either from historical point of view or with a strong image (the Big House), which evokes Protestant Ascendancy. The spatial frames of Irish fiction are set and determined, despite their occasional disturbance by visitors. Space and place in Irish fiction play an integral role in both creation and rediscovery of iden tity, on both a personal and a national level. Published in 1800, Castle Rackrent may be seen as a novella or tale, owing to its brevity. Its full and weighty title?Castle Rackrent, An Hibernian Tale: Taken from Facts, and from Manners of Irish Squires, before Year 1/82?iron ically backs up case for text as tale over novel. Regardless, Edgeworth's title draws attention to book's Irishness.3 You know it is set in Ireland and is about Irish people. Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) does this too, but in a more subtle and discreet way. Indeed, later Irish fiction?from Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte (1894) through James Joyce's fiction and on to William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983)?does not seem to feel need to declare itself as Irish so early on. This change of tactic suggests that Irish

The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the National Tale

[Sydney Owenson’s sentiments are] mischievous in tendency, and profligate in principle; licentious and irreverent in the highest degree . . . If . . . she could be persuaded to exchange her idle raptures for common sense, practice a little self-denial, and gather a few precepts of humility, from an old-fashioned book, which, although it does not seem to have lately fallen in her way, may yet, we think, be found in some corner of her study; she might then hope to prove, not indeed a good writer of novels, but a useful friend, a faithful wife, a tender mother, and a respectable and happy mistress of a family.1

Cooking Up a Story: Jane West, Prudentia Homespun, and the Consumption of Fiction

Cooking Up a Story:Jane West, Pmdentia Homespun, and the Consumption of Fiction David Thame TJ ec JXa ecovering from the weekend visit of a boisterous nephew,Jane usten wrote to Cassandra: I enjoyed Edward's companyvery much, & yet I was not sorrywhen friday came ... I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care ofdie House;—And how good Mrs West could have written such Books & collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is still a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full ofJoints ofmuttons & doses ofrhubarb.1 Jane West (1758-1852) had published her last novel two years before Austen wrote this letter and did not publish again until afterAusten's death, yet a powerful image remained: West producing food and fiction. Of course food here, as so often, serves as a metonym for domesticity and its trials, but the association of food and fiction in 1 JaneAusten's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 321. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 218 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION West's work may have given rise to Austen's casual remark. That association, in turn, may help throw new light on the struggle of women writers for literary authority in the decades that conclusively established the nineteenth-century realist novel as serious and respectable.2Awiderpolemic purpose for this article is the old call of adfontes? The valuable feministscholarship ofthe last three decades has resurrected as viable subjects ofinquiry many hitherto forgotten women writers, including West, but the body of work of these neglected women novelists has not been resurrected whole: limbs are missing. Many ofthe works ofwriters such as West, Amelia Opie, and Sydney Owenson remain unread, while the handful selected (for whatever reasons) for facsimile reprints or modern editions are treated to relatively lavish and disproportionate attention. The picture changes once West's later (unreprinted) novels—TheRefusal (1810), TheLoyalists {1812), and Alicia deLacy (1814)—are reintegrated into accounts of her work.4 No doubt the preparation and consumption offood weighed heavily on West's mind as it would on any diligent housekeeper in the days before supermarkets and refrigeration, and, not surprisingly, the composition of meals and of tales came to mingle in West's imagination. In her poem "To the Hon. Mrs C-E," West wrote: "You said the author was a charmer, / Self-taught, and married to a farmer; / Who wrote all kinds ofverse widi ease, / Made pies and puddings, frocks and cheese."5In 1802, arare beam ofpublicityilluminatedWest's 2 Ina Ferris, TheAchievement ofLiteraryAutliority: Gender, History and tlie WaverleyNovels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 3 Richard F. Hamilton, VieSocialMisconstruction ofReahty: Validity and Verification in tlieScliolarly Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). I have already attempted somethingsimilarforAmelia Opie: David Thame, "Amelia Opie's Maniacs," Women's Writing 7 (2000), 309-26. 4 Jane West, TheAdvantages ofEducation, or, VieHistory ofMaria Williams, A TaleforMisses and TheirMammas (AE), 2 vols (London, 1793);West,/i Gossip'sStory, anda Legendary Tale (GS), 2 vols (London, 1796);West, A Taleoftlie Times (TT), 3 vols (London, 1799);West, Thelnfidel Father (IF), 3vols (London, 1802);West, TheRefusal (R), 3 vols (London, 1810); [West], Vie Loyalists: An Historical Novel (L), 3 vols (London, 1812); West, Alicia de Lacy, An Historical Romance (A de L), 4 vols (London, 1814). References are to these editions. 5 West, "To die Hon. Mrs. C-E" (1791), Miscellaneous Poems, and A Tragedy (York, 1791), pp. 115-21. For West's life, see Pamela Wilder Lloyd's invaluable "Jane West: A Critical COOKING UP ASTORY 219 private life, and that controversyalso revolved around the extent ofthe novelist's dailyinvolvementwith kitchen business.6Farfrom finding die publicity irksome and demeaning, as some of her friends supposed, Westwasdelightedand lookedforward to increased consumption ofher novels, "considering every discussion concerning me as likely to promote me saleofmyworkwhich is the great object I have in view."7 West's cheerfully commercial attitude to writing—a task expliciüy associated with food since she wrote to help feed her family, satisfying the appetites of readers in an effort to satisfy the appetites of her children—will serve as...

Displaying Ireland: Sydney Owenson and the Politics of Spectacular Antiquarianism

DISPLAYING IRELAND: SYDNEY OWENSON AND THE POLITICS OF SPECTACULAR ANTIQUARIANISM1 NATASHA TESSONE INTRODUCTION The rise of cultural nationalism in early-nineteenth-century Ireland coincided with a growing interest in Gaelic antiquity and history. Fed by a passion for things Gaelic, the antiquarian movement forged a tight link between Ireland’s material culture and national feeling, a link of immense political consequence for both nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism . I want to stress, however, that neither the Irish nor the Anglo-Irish antiquarian appetite for Gaelic Ireland existed as a cultural phenomenon with a genesis confined to Ireland. Rather, this emerging antiquarian discipline was closely related to those discourses produced by nineteenth-century British imperialism, the same discourses imagining Ireland as yet another of England’s many symbolic Others. Edward Said notes that antiquarianism belongs to the group of disciplines—travel literature, geography , ethnography, archeology, science—whose institutionalization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the evolution of the “specifically modern structures of Orientalism.”2 Interestingly, the museum and museum-like exhibitionary practices, another field specializing in the lost past of the antiquarian, is absent from Said’s study of Orientalism, although conceptually and ideologically informed by its logic. Exhibitions catered to the expanding interest in travel and geographical exploration ; as Richard Altick notes, “the broadened sense of history, one of the most influential developments in nineteenth-century culture . . . promptSYDNEY OWENSON AND THE POLITICS OF ANTIQUARIANISM 169 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 13th Graduate Irish Studies Conference , “Locating Ireland,” held at Boston College in October 2001. Thanks to Claudia L. Johnson, Marjorie Howes, Jonathan Lamb, and, most of all, Abby Bender for their insightful comments on different versions of the essay. 2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 116. ed exhibitors to reach into areas of the past not represented in the old conventional collections of ‘antiquities.’”3 Nineteenth-century England was, indeed, “the Staring Nation” par excellence,4 one whose sense of national identity was inextricably tied to the gaze at the Other staged by museums and related public shows. What happens when one such “Other” attempts an appropriation of, as Joseph Roach calls them, “ocularcentric practices”5 for the purpose of promoting a certain type of national ideal? My discussion of this question centers on Sydney Owenson, a pivotal figure in an earlynineteenth -century cultural movement seeking to rekindle Irish national feeling through the museological deployment of antiquarian practices.6 Today, Owenson is acclaimed as the pioneer of the Irish national novel7; however, for her contemporaries she was first and foremost a patriot, the passionate partisan of Irish causes, or, as the Freeman’s Journal called her, “one of the greatest ornaments our country could ever boast of.”8 No matter how trite, such praise was apt, for Owenson passionately sought to restore dignity to Ireland by recovering its most treasured ornaments—its language, history, music, and antiquities. One can regard Owenson, then, as a literary antiquarian/ethnographer/archeologist —or as an orientalist9 whose first “national tale,” The Wild Irish Girl SYDNEY OWENSON AND THE POLITICS OF ANTIQUARIANISM 170 3 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 288. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Joseph Roach, “The Artificial Eye,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourses and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 133. 6 As it will become clear from the rest of my discussion, Owenson cannot be totally reduced to England’s “true” colonial Other, the subaltern that, according to Spivak’s decree, cannot speak—hence the quotation marks in the text above around the second appearance of the word “Other.” 7 See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997). 8 Quoted in Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora Press, 1988), 82. 9 Among critics who have discussed Owenson’s role in “orientalizing” Ireland, see Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) and “How The Wild Irish Girl...