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Lady Morgan:
Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
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EDITORS’ PREFACE
PERSONS INDEX
LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS
TITLES INDEX
DOCUMENT INFORMATION

contents:
Preface
Prefatory Address
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Vol. I Index
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter IV
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Vol. II Index
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The Wild Irish Girl
Diminutive in stature, Lady Morgan (1775?-1859) was an outsized personality and for several decades a commanding presence on the literary scene. Sydney Owenson, as she then was, is remembered as the author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), an innovative national tale written in response to the 1800 Act of Union. While her Irish fiction was popular, so also were her accounts of her travels, France, 2 vols (1817) and Italy, 2 vols (1821), and the essays she contributed to the New Monthly Magazine and other periodicals. She was very much a professional woman of letters, publishing in all the major genres: poetry, drama, essays, biography, and history. She was fiercely independent and proud of the comfortable living she earned by her writings. In the course of a long and eventful life she came to know many notable persons, making her Memoirs a rich source of information about literary and public life in the early nineteenth century.
It is one of the more substantial life-and-letters volumes. In her later years Lady Morgan began work on an autobiography; as her eyesight failed she took on the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–1880) as an amanuensis. Miss Jewsbury assisted with An Odd Volume extracted from an Autobiography (1859) and also with the posthumous Memoirs (1862). While the latter volume is often attributed to Lady Morgan's literary executor, William Hepworth Dixon (1821–1879), it would appear from his preface that while he was responsible for seeing the book through the press she transcribed the letters and wrote the biographical passages.
The object, he says, was to allow Lady Morgan to “tell her own story in her own way.” This is both good and bad: Lady Morgan left a more complete set of materials than usually went into a life-and-letters: an autobiographical fragment covering her childhood and youth, extensive correspondence including many of her own letters, and a fragmentary journal sporadically covering the second half of her life. But Jewsbury and Dixon seem to have underestimated the labor required to make a book out of it all, supplying little in the way of narrative connection, misdating letters, and leaving many names garbled, ambiguous, or otherwise unintelligible (Lady Morgan's handwriting was notoriously bad). A second edition (1863) was hastily issued to correct some of the transcription errors. Either as a result of Lady Morgan's own intentions or from carelessness on the part of her executors, much is included that more scrupulous editors would have toned down or excised.
Sydney Morgan had a hard-scrabble childhood. Her father, Robert Owenson, was an actor and theater manager who unaccountably married an English evangelical Christian who had little use for actors or Irishness. In the Owenson family it was feast or famine, Irish folkways and fecklessness alternating with English moralizing and reform. Lady Morgan loved Ireland but once pensioned was happy to abandon Dublin for London's fashionable West End. She was a stout defender of the Irish populace who liked nothing better than to hobnob with Lords Lieutenant and socialize with the Castle gentry. It is not difficult to see the impact of her parents on her adult character: by contrary examples she learned the virtue of tolerance from her mother and from her father the value of prudence. Both fostered her love of family and the finer things in life. Her unfinished memoir is a profoundly suggestive if elliptical reflection on her complex social origins.
It can be deliberately elusive, as when she studiously presents herself as a decade younger than she in fact was—vanity being one of her prime characteristics—or when she carefully avoids any mention of the traumatic events of 1798. “What has a woman to do with dates?” she writes (1:6): “I have no reason to complain of memory; I find in my efforts to track its records, guided by the fond feelings of my life, and warmed by the fancifulness of my Celtic temperament, bright hues come forward like the colours of the tesselated pavement of antiquity when the renovating water is flung upon them” (1:2). Thus her attitude towards things past; in her letters—concerned with times present—one observes a calculating and manipulative personality of the Becky Sharp variety.
The first volume recounts her rise from impoverished schoolgirl to governess to lady's companion to successful novelist; it concludes with a long series of love-letters exchanged with her future husband, Thomas Charles Morgan, a seraphic materialist with magnetic powers not unlike her own. If these letters emulate Werter and the Nouvelle Heloise in their romantic postures, Sydney of the many suitors was by then (1811) of an age when it was time to be practical about marriage. She seems to have extracted a Irish knighthood and government position for her English husband as a condition of surrendering her independent status. The by-all-accounts happy marriage extended her intellectual and geographical horizons: the Morgans traveled in Europe, collaborated on books, and acquired an international reputation.
They were ardent Whigs determined to cultivate the reformist legacy of the French Revolution. Lady Morgan adored the Bonapartes and all connected with them, at every opportunity reprobating the British Government and its Continental allies. She became an Irish Leigh Hunt and was treated accordingly by the Tory press, particularly the Quarterly Review. This seems only to have enhanced her reputation, and by the 1820s the Morgans were respected members of the Whig establishment pushing for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland and political reform in England. Byron admired Lady Morgan's book on Italy, as well he might; she even anticipated him as a supporter of modern Greece in her novel Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809). Lady Morgan's Irish nationalism was tempered by a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan outlook. From the beginning her literary models had been European: Goethe, Rousseau, de Genlis, DeStael. She imitated French epistolary styles, intellectual attitudes, and social manners and was consequently mocked for her vulgarity, impiety. and bad French.
Lady Morgan's correspondence leaves the impression that she pursued literature chiefly as a means of gaining access to the rich and powerful. Allusions to books and writers are few in proportion to the long lists of aristocrats and social events. She did not slight her profession—quite the contrary—but she regarded writing in an instrumental light. She wrote for money and prestige, and as the letters and journals indicate, for all her love of fine flattery she had an acute understanding of the literary marketplace as such. Her books were topical and thus short-lived, but always timely. Her correspondence with her cagey publishers, Sir Richard Phillips and Henry Colburn, is one of the highlights of the Memoirs.
One writer she did take an interest in was Byron. They never met but had many associates in common, notably Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Morgan admired Byron while he was alive and cherished his memory when he was dead; she was deeply distressed when she lost a locket given to her by Teresa Guiccioli containing a lock of his hair. Caroline Lamb was of particular interest to Lady Morgan, not only for the connection to Byron but because the Ponsonby's were an important Irish family. They met socially as early as 1811 but were closest in the 1820s. When Lady Caroline's marriage dissolved she turned to Lady Morgan for support and advice, and bequeathed to her the precious portrait of Byron. Lady Morgan reciprocated by taking down Lady Caroline's account of her affair with Byron, one of the more important documents in the Memoirs. The kindly interest Lady Morgan took in his wayward wife may have influenced Lord Melbourne's later decision to grant her a pension.
Reviews of the Memoirs were mixed: Lady Morgan was a polarizing figure even in death. The hostile dissection in Fraser's (February 1863) is required reading, for it was written by someone much better acquainted with Lady Morgan's Irish millieu than Jewsbury or Dixon. Some reviews were mildly condescending, while others admired Lady Morgan for her frank acknowledgments of her faults, a characteristic that seems to have been part of her charisma, as it had once been of Rousseau's.
While the Memoirs lacks the literary brilliance of Moore's Byron or Lockhart's Scott the experience of reading it complete can be moving. One marvels at young “Glorvina's” ability to overcome obstacles, at the range of people she knew and scenes she witnessed in maturity, at the insatiable zest for life she carried into old age. Lady Morgan was a worldly, calculating woman who had studied the correspondence of French courtiers and courtesans to good effect, but that aspect of her character was balanced by an obviously sincere and selfless love for her family and political causes. Though a professed feminist she did not much care for the society of women (so she says), preferring the attentions of ambitious young men. Her scarcely concealed jealousy of the Duchess of St. Albans (the Irish actress who married a peer half her age) and unwillingness to be seen in the company of old Samuel Rogers (memento mori) can seem oddly endearing.
She wrote to Alicia LeFanu in 1803, “I am ambitious, far, far beyond the line of laudable emulations, perhaps beyond the power of being happy. Yet the strongest point of my ambition is to be every inch a woman” (1:230). That she was.
David Hill Radcliffe