Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Alicia Le Fanu to Lady Morgan, 19 February 1817
Ash Wednesday,
February 19, 1817.
Many thanks, dear Lady
Morgan, for your frequent and kind inquiries. I am very ill, and
hopeless of being better. My great anxiety about Joseph made me forget and neglect myself until severe pain
forced me to resort to medical aid. A severe cold, caught on Christmas day, and
great uneasiness of mind, have put me in a state of continual suffering.
I wish I was able to write any satisfactory account of my
brother. Watkins’s history of him and my family is a tissue
of falsehood. What satisfaction could it be to him to write the life of a man
whom he evi-![]()
| FIRST VISIT TO FRANCE—1815-1816. | 61 |
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dently hates and basely calumniates? Of my
family history he knows nothing: he must be a very impertinent fellow to take
the liberties he has done with a family he could know nothing of.
But S. White did
worse; for he
fabricated letters from my mother, &c., that she could not have written. He
was the natural son of an uncle of my mother, who left him five hundred pounds,
with which, and my father’s assistance, he set up a school; but he never
was acknowledged as our relation,—we never were boarded with him or
placed under his care, &c., &c.,—all lies.
My mother’s
sketch of a comedy, unfinished, was put into my brother Richard’s hands by my father at Bath, when we were resident there; but my father
never even hinted that he had made any use of it in The Rivals. Of my
own knowledge I can say nothing, for I never read it.
I hope your labours will soon be over and amply rewarded.
Much is expected from you; and I trust you will not disappoint expectation.
Believe me, affectionately yours,
Alicia Le Fanu (1753-1817)
Irish novelist and playwright, the eldest daughter of Thomas Sheridan and grandmother of
Sheridan Le Fanu; she published
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs.
Frances Sheridan (1824).
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1793-1833)
Of Dublin, the son of Joseph and Alicia Le Fanu; he is not the novelist of the same name
(1814-1873).
Sir Thomas Charles Morgan (1780-1843)
English physician and philosophical essayist who married the novelist Sydney Owenson in
1812; he was the author of
Sketches of the Philosophy of Morals
(1822). He corresponded with Cyrus Redding.
Frances Sheridan [née Chamberlaine] (1724-1766)
Irish playwright and novelist, wife of the actor Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788); she was the
author of
Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and an oriental
tale,
The History of Nourjahad (1767).
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
Anglo-Irish playwright, author of
The School for Scandal (1777),
Whig MP and ally of Charles James Fox (1780-1812).
Thomas Sheridan the younger (1719-1788)
Irish actor and writer on education and elocution; author of, among others,
A Course of Lectures on Elocution: together with Two Dissertations on
Language (1762). He was the father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
John Watkins (1765-1831 fl.)
English schoolmaster, biographer, and associate of Samuel Badcock; he compiled a
Universal Biographical and Historical Dictionary (1800) and wrote
the first life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Samuel Whyte (1734-1811)
Irish poet and schoolmaster who in 1758 established an academy in Grafton Street, Dublin
where the Sheridans, among other notables, were instructed.
