Sparkling Sydney

The Wild Irish Girl, by Sydney Owenson, was first published in 1806, since when it has rarely been out of print. I knew nothing of this novel or its author until a few years ago, when I was writing about the Italian poet and philosopher Leopardi and needed to place this tormented genius against a real background. I read diaries and letters by those who took the Grand Tour and more than once came upon the name of one Lady Morgan, an Irish feminist and patriot who, by the age of 25, was supporting herself, her father and her sister on the novels, travel books, articles and pamphlets she wrote under her maiden name, Sydney Owenson.

As soon as I read Sydney on Italy I was hooked; I found her principled, cheerful, energetic, imaginative and decent: excellent company. She was passionate about her writing and regularly stuck at it for eight hours at a sitting. She had unusual confidence in herself and her femininity; she was creative – could make her own clothes and, when let down by her chef just a few hours before giving a dinner party, did the cooking herself. She believed in justice and equality at home and abroad which, like feminism and atheism, were not principles universally espoused by her contemporaries. Unlike many travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sydney did not travel abroad to plunder her hosts of their art and artefacts but to familiarize herself personally with foreign places and peoples. She made an enormous impression wherever she went and was courted and admired ‘as well for her unrivalled talents as her elegant and unaffected manners’. Byron wrote of her Italy (1821): ‘Her work is fearless and excellent . . . I know the country. I wish she had fallen in with me; I could have told her a thing or two that would have confirmed her position.’ But of course she was roundly criticized too, by the usual suspects. Before setting out, Sydney spent two years boning up on Italian history. She acquired a prodigious knowledge of the country’s art and architecture, its social and political texture and the lie of the land. But it was her refreshingly personal reflections which most impressed me: ‘enchanted’ by the country and its people, she has a unique way of luring her readers to follow in her footsteps. She was a scholarly woman who nevertheless knew how to enjoy herself. It is a great sorrow to me that in my old age I no longer have the strength to follow Sydney on her travels through Europe. In the past, when I became deeply affected by a book, I would set out to retrace the land and cityscapes – the reality in which it was set. This took me all over Europe, and solidified and intensified my memories. Today my journeys are confined to buses to and from the British Library, where writers more mobile than I do the footwork for me. Getting about Italy during the early nineteenth century was uncomfortable – the roads unmade, the inns few and inhospitable and the food uneatable. Lady Morgan (her married name, under which she travelled) does not allow these trivialities to spoil her delight. As a tourist she leaves no church, no monument, no picture gallery, theatre, silkworm factory, university, library or public garden unvisited and unassessed. She attends the ballet, is loaned a box at the opera – normally ‘set aside for the noblesse’ – and a carriage. She is invited everywhere, and wherever she goes she writes up the scene as if she were painting it. But she does not allow what her eyes rejoice to see to blind her to the striking chasm between the stunning beauty and fecundity of the fields and the condition of the peasantry, who go ‘bare-footed, dirty and slovenly’. As she moves across Italy she always has Ireland in mind, comparing the social injustices – the sheer waste of human life that she observes there – with those suffered in Ireland. Buoyed up by what I found in the two heavy volumes of Italy (1821), I turned to Sydney’s letters. They are unabashedly intimate, affectionate, informed and witty. I read her memoirs, from which I came to understand what made her both popular and controversial: she was a militant patriot; she was a feminist; she rejected religion. In addition, she was constantly exercised by the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Her principal missions in life were to effect greater equality among people and to replace the view of Ireland and its people held by the English – ill-informed, ugly and patronizing – with her own. Biographies refer to the excellent education Sydney’s less educated father – a poor itinerant Catholic actor – had given his daughter. She had Latin and Greek, French and Italian, a taste for research and the ability to communicate her ideas clearly. But that education did not save her from having to earn her keep. The only way open to a woman of her age and social status was to get work as a governess and she made the most of this by storing up her experiences for future novels. She does not complain about being little more than a servant in the houses of the nobility, for she was loved by all upon whom she waited, regardless of the fact that not all her opinions tallied with theirs. It was through the patronage of her employers that she rose to become the most widely sought guest in London’s and Dublin’s most fashionable houses. Indeed, she was to become known as the ‘Irish de Staël’. The title her patrons negotiated for her doctor husband was not something which Sydney engineered, but it certainly helped her socially; as Lady Morgan she was always surrounded by people who wielded social, intellectual and political clout. No individual and no situation overawed or silenced her; she managed to maintain her own identity, upholding the virtues of old Ireland by dressing in medi- eval Irish costume and entertaining on the harp. She saw herself as belonging to a time when Irish language and literature flourished. She was the first Irish writer to express the passion and commitment of those Anglo-Irish who took up the nationalist cause. At the same time, she preserved her femininity; she was admired for her looks and was clearly much occupied by her appearance. Though hardly what was deemed a great beauty – she was just four foot, chubby and ‘quaint’ – Sir Thomas Lawrence asked to be allowed to draw her. Sydney was clearly someone whose soul dominated. What started as affection and admiration for a woman quite unlike any other taking the Grand Tour ended by my reading The Wild Irish Girl. The Wild Irish Girl is Sydney Owenson’s manifesto, and her greatest success. It is an epistolary novel without much in the way of intricacies of plot, but with a purpose: to educate the English as to the real nature of the Irish and the history and culture of their ancient country. On the one hand, it is a fairy tale with fine descriptive writing. On the other, it is an allegory written at a time when the Irish seemed to have lost their identity. It tells of a prejudiced young Englishman, Horatio Mortimer, banished by his father to the family’s Irish estates for his dissolute behaviour. His treatment of women has been gross, his financial dealings irresponsible and he has neglected his law studies. He has disgraced the family name. The Mortimer family estates to which Horatio is banished had been won by conquest under Cromwell, since when things had gone from bad to worse for the Irish. From 1800 Ireland – through the Act of Union – had been a colony economically controlled by England. Sydney Owenson saw it as her responsibility to study ancient Gaelic history and culture, to set down the manifold sufferings of generations of Irish people and return to them an identity distinct from the English Protestants who had become their overlords. Horatio has all the prejudices of the English of his time; he has never been to Ireland but believes – as do his contemporaries – that Ireland is a barbarous place inhabited by barbarous people. He compares what he does not know of the country to the ‘savage desolations of Siberia’. He is sure that without educated company and refined entertainment he will be unbearably bored. Arriving in Dublin, he is faced with all the ‘vice, poverty, idleness and filth’ he had expected, and finds the Irish ‘dreadful and disgusting beyond all expression’. However, on leaving the city and heading north-west to the coast of Connaught, he starts to find himself unexpectedly touched by the pride, generosity and gratitude of the suffering populace he encounters, and he is captivated by the beauty of the Irish countryside: Mountain rising over mountain, swelled like an amphitheatre to those clouds which, faintly tinged with the sun’s preclusive beams, and rising from the earthly summits where they had reposed, incorporated with the kindling aether of a purer atmosphere. All was silent and solitary – a tranquillity tinged with terror, or a sort of ‘delightful horror’, breathed on every side.

He is overwhelmed by what he sees, understanding through his encounters that the near-starving peasants huddled in hovels with their animals are the descendants of a noble people with a civilization much older than his own. Horatio is undergoing a moral education. He confronts the demolition of Ireland and the Irish brought about by the English, and on discovering that his own forebears benefited from Ireland’s loss, sets about making amends.

I hope anyone inclined to get a copy of The Wild Irish Girl will be encouraged to find out more about Sydney and place her firmly in her rightful position as one of our most distinguished feminists. I do not imagine that if asked why she wrote, she would have disagreed with Orwell’s answer to the same question: political purpose, historical impulse, aesthetic enthusiasm and sheer egoism.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 54 © Elisabeth Russell Taylor 2017