Born: 25 December 1781, Ireland
Died: 14 April 1859
Country most active: Ireland, United Kingdom
Also known as: Sydney Owenson, Glorvina
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Joep Leerssen. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) (c.1783–1859), novelist and literary celebrity, was born in Dublin. Her father, the Mayo-born Robert Owenson (originally Mac Eóin, 1744–1812), was an actor whose native command of Irish ensured his success with ‘stage Irish’ characters; her mother, Jane Hill, was from a Shrewsbury protestant family. Owenson was notoriously coy about her age; her date of birth may have been anywhere between 1778 and 1785. In her youth she imbibed the theatrical flamboyance and the Irish-patriotic politics of her father, who ran a ‘national theatre’ in Fishamble Street, Dublin. Her harp-playing, which became her trademark in later life, was already featured in the Irish-patriotic performances of this theatre.
Owenson’s early activities followed the recent Irish rediscovery of the harp as the national instrument. A small volume of verse, published in 1807, was titled The lay of an Irish harp; in 1805 she had published Twelve original Hibernian melodies, which foreshadowed Moore’s Irish melodies by three years. The topic of a harp-playing young woman as the spokeswoman of her nation was also central to her first and best-remembered novel, The wild Irish girl (1806). More romantic and romance-like than Maria Edgeworth’s social satire Castle Rackrent (1800), The wild Irish girl became the prototype of a new kind of Ireland-related fiction: the ‘national tale’. This genre, which flourished in the years between the Act of Union and catholic emancipation, and of which, besides Owenson, the main representatives are Charles Maturin and the brothers John Banim and Michael Banim, combines stirring incident and local-historical colour with the political agenda of disenchanted Grattanite patriotism, denouncing the exploitation and oppression of Ireland and its native peasantry.
From 1798, when her father’s fortunes as a theatre manager declined, Owenson held various positions as governess or lady companion. The last of these was with Marchioness Abercorn, who arranged her marriage to the family physician, Thomas Charles Morgan. A knighthood for Morgan seems to have been part of the deal. Following the wedding (1812), Owenson was known as Lady Morgan, and added to her literary reputation that of a headstrong and eccentric socialite in the style of Mme de Staël.
Throughout her career, Owenson (again, like Mme de Staël) remained true to the whiggish principles of her early life. These were now increasingly unfashionable, and subject to much suspicion, scorn, and ridicule from a conservative press bolstered by anti-Jacobin and anti-Napoleonic sentiments. Owenson’s Patriotic sketches of Ireland defiantly maintained a Grattanite agenda even in the post-Union years. Her national tales (O’Donnel, 1814; Florence Macarthy, 1818; The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, 1826) continued with their melodramatic adventures, drawing not only on Irish local colour but also on Irish divisions and tensions.
But Owenson’s non-Irish novels also consistently addressed themes and settings which bespoke a liberal or even radical commitment at odds with the prevailing reactionary climate. Woman, or, Ida of Athens (1809), influenced by Mme de Staël-style sentimental feminism, is also a very early indication of the rising European tide of philhellenism; a more harnessed feminism was evinced by her later Woman and her master (1840). The missionary (1811) addresses religious conflict in the Indian colonies, while The princess (1834) celebrates the liberalism of newly independent Belgium. Her travelogues, too, breathed this liberal spirit. France (1817, sequel in 1830) incurred strenuous Tory criticism; Italy (1821) implicitly endorsed that nation’s anti-Metternich resentment. Accordingly, the book was banned, and the author declared non grata in the papal states and the Habsburg empire.
In 1837 the Morgans moved from Dublin to London, where Sir Thomas died in 1843, to be outlived by his widow by sixteen years; Owenson herself (who was the first woman ever to receive a civil-list pension, to the sum of £300 annually) died in London on 13 April 1859.
From 1804 onwards, Owenson had been involved in an ongoing controversy with the conservative press led by John Wilson Croker. Her writings were savagely reviewed and mocked, and she herself generally preferred strenuous rebuttal to dignified silence. Even among those who appreciated her literary gifts or her political stance (Walter Scott, Thomas Moore), the diminutive, slightly hunch-backed and volubly forthright Owenson became a figure of condescending humour. Scott named his daughter’s most stubborn donkey ‘Lady Morgan’, even though he acknowledged the influence of her national tales on his own historical novels. Only Byron’s admiration did she seem to have won fully, but he was dead by 1825. Owenson’s politics were also increasingly out of touch with political developments. Her Grattanite combination of patriot-style liberalism and anti-papist protestantism meant that she fell foul of all parties: British Tories, Irish Unionists, and O’Connellite repealers.
Among later readers and literary critics, too, Owenson was long considered an oddity. This is in part due to the highly coloured, melodramatic narrative style of her national tales, which indeed tends to throw a bizarre sheen over her very serious intent. In recent decades, however, recognition has been growing for her dauntlessness, for the originality and importance of her work, and for its timeliness in the political climate of the Regency years.
The NLI holds Owenson’s diaries and commonplace books, as well as some correspondence; other letters are in the Bodleian Library and the Huntington Library. Manuscripts of her writings are in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, and further papers are with the University of Iowa. Portraits are in the collections of the NGI and National Portrait Gallery in London.
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
MORGAN, SYDNEY LADY, Whose maiden name was Sydney Owenson, was born in Dublin, about 1783. Her father, Mr. Robert Owenson, was a respectable actor at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, and gave his daughter the best advantages of education he could command. He was a man of decided talents, a favourite in the society of the city, and author of some popular Irish songs. His daughter, Sydney, inherited his predilection for national music and song. Very early in life, when she was a mere child, she published a small volume of poetical effusions; and soon after, “The Lay of the Irish Harp,” and a selection of twelve Irish melodies, set to music. One of these is the well-known song of “Kate Kearney;” probably this popular lyric will outlive all the other writings of this authoress. Her next work was a novel, “St. Clair, or the Heiress of Desmond,” published when she was about sixteen. It was soon followed by “The Novice of St. Dominick;” and then her most successful work, “The Wild Irish Girl,” which appeared in the winter of 1801.
The book had a prodigious sale. Within the first two years, seven editions were published in Great Britain, besides two or three in America. It gained for Miss Owenson a celebrity which very few writers, of either sex, have won at so early an ago. It gained her the love and blessings of the Irish people, of course; and a far more difficult achievement, it won for her a high reputation out of her own country.
What are the peculiar merits of the work which won this popularity? As a novel, it certainly cannot be rated very high. The plot shows little inventive talent, and is, moreover, liable to some objection on the score of moral tendency. Nor is the merit of the work in its style, which is both high-flown and puerile. The exaggerated sentiment, so often poured out by the fervid, but uncultivated writer, appears more nonsensical from the pompous phraseology in which it is frequently expressed.
Such is the prevailing style of the book, though occasionally, when giving utterance to some strong deep feeling, which usually finds its appropriate language, the author is truly eloquent. How could a novel so written, gain such popularity? Because it had a high aim, a holy purpose. It owed its success entirely to the simple earnestness with which Miss Owenson defended her country. It is all Irish. She seemed to have no thought of self, nothing but patriotism was in her soul, and this feeling redeemed the faults of inflated style, French sentimentalism, false reasoning, and all the extravagances of her youthful fancy. Ireland was her inspiration and her theme. Its history, language, antiquities, traditions, and wrongs, these she had studied as a zealot does his creed, and with a fervour only inferior in sacredness to that of religion, she poured her whole heart and mind forth in the cause of her own native land.
After such remarkable success, it was a matter of course that Miss Owenson should continue her literary career. “Patriotic Sketches,” “Ida,” and “The Missionary,” followed each other in quick succession. Her next work was “O’Donnell;” then “Florence Macarthy, an Irish Tale,” was published in 1818. Previously to this Miss Owenson became Lady Morgan, by marrying Sir Charles Morgan, M.D., a gentleman of considerable talents, as his own work, “Sketches of the Philosophy of Life and Morals,” shows. The marriage seemed to give new energy and a wider scope to the genius of Lady Morgan; the tastes of the husband and wife were, evidently, in sympathy. They went abroad, and “France” and “Italy,” two clever specimens of Lady Morgan’s powers of observation and description, were the result. These works are lively and entertaining. Lord Byron has borne testimony to the fidelity and excellence of “Italy:” if the authoress had been less solicitous of making a sensation, her book would have been more perfect, yet now it is among the best of its kind.
“The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys,” a novel intended to portray national manners, appeared in 1827; “The Book of the Boudoir” in 1829. Among her other works are, “The Princess,” a story founded on the Revolution in Belgium, “Dramatic Scenes from Real Life,” “The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,” and “Woman and her Master,” published in London, 1840. Two volumes of this work were then issued: the authoress, suffering under that painful affliction, a weakness of the eyes, which terminated in loss of sight, was unable to complete her plan, and it has never been finished. It is a philosophical history of woman down to the fall of the Roman Empire,—a work on which Lady Morgan evidently laboured with great zeal. It should be carefully read by all who wish to gain a compendious knowledge of woman’s history, and a graphic sketch of her influence in the early ages. Many new and valuable truths are promulgated; and though some of the opinions are unsound, because unscriptural, yet the earnest wish to benefit her sex, and improve society, has gifted the writer with great power in setting forth much that is true, and of the utmost importance.
It appears to us that the greatest blemish in the works of this indefatigable writer, is the under-current, more or less strong, running through many of them, bearing the philosophical opinions, or sayings rather, of the French sentimental school of infidels. We do not think Lady Morgan an unbeliever; but she gives occasion for censure by expressions, occasionally, that favour free-thinkers. If she had but served God, in her writings, with the same enthusiastic zeal she served her country, what a glorious woman she would have been!
Before she quite relinquished her literary labours, Lady Morgan, in conjunction with her husband, produced two volumes of sketches, which appeared under the title of “A Book without a Name.” Lady Morgan has made large sacrifices for liberal principles, which she has at all times boldly avowed, and the pension of three hundred pounds a year from the Civil List, conferred on her by Lord Grey during his ministry, was well deserved for this and her services to the world of letters.
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Lady Sydney Morgan, an Irish novelist, born in Dublin, daughter of Robert Owenson, an actor.
She began her career with a precocious volume of poems, and collected Irish tunes, for which she composed the words, thus setting a fashion adopted later by Thomas Moore and Stevenson. Her first novel St. Clair, in which the influence of Goethe and Rousseau was apparent, at once attracted attention, but the book which made her reputation and brought her name into warm controversy was The Wild Irish Girl (1806) in which she appeared as the ardent champion of her native country, a politician rather than a novelist, extolling the beauty of Ireland, and the noble traditions of its early history.
Having secured a high position in fashionable and literary life, she removed from Dublin to London, and in 1812 was married to Sir Charles Morgan, an eminent physician.
But books continued to flow from her facile pen, and in 1817 she published her elaborate study of France under the Bourbon restoration. It was attacked with fury in the Quarterly reviewer is insulted with supreme feminine ingenuity.
Lady Morgan wrote many other books and was one of the most vivid and hotly discussed literary figures of her generation.
The following is excerpted from A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, written by John W. Cousins and published in 1929 by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
MORGAN, LADY (SYDNEY OWENSON) (1780?-1859). —Novelist, dau. of Robert Owenson, an actor, was the author of several vivacious Irish tales, including The Wild Irish Girl (1806), O’Donnel (1814), and The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties (1827); also two books on society in France and in Italy characterised by “more vivacity and point than delicacy,” and a Life of Salvator Rosa.