Bluestocking Revels
SYDNEY OWENSON, Lady Morgan, died with the reverberation of the Indian Mutiny in her ears. She was born in the year of the American Declaration of Independence, grew up to the tune of Liberty, and matured into a witty, indiscreet but respectable radical. " She lived," said The Alliemeum in a review of her autobiography, " through the love, admira- tion and malice of three generations of men "—through revolution and reaction into regency, and from regency into respectability.
Her birth was comparatively humble. Her father, a cousin of Goldsmith's, ran away to the stage and made a reputation as a singer of Irish songs and as an expert in the " potheen- twang " which was becoming recognised on the Dublin stage. He was, in no small way, a notable precursor of the class of professional Paddies—an easy, convivial man, large spender and tender father. His early efforts to procure recognition for her literary talents were successful. They led, first of all, to the well-subscribed publication of some indifferent poetic juvenilia, which led in their turn to her employment as a rather privileged governess-companion to several families. Between dancing jigs, singing " Ned of the Hill " with grand pathos and generally amusing her employers' guests, Miss Owenson found time to write her first novel.
A part of the interest Miss Owenson deserves derives, as Mr. Stevenson points out, from the fact that her novels reflect most clearly the literary fashions and fashionable sentiments of her time. St. Clair, published in 1801, was a long, flowery Rousseauesque novel in the form of a series of letters between a pair of romantic lovers. The novel exhibits most of the hall-marks of the prevailing Gothic fashion—high sensibility, platonic walks in wild scenery, ruins, a duel, and a broken heart. But it was in her heroine that Sydney Owenson's real spark of talent declared itself. St. Clair's Olivia is a sympathetic creation, for she is none other than Sydney Owenson's ideal self—gay though sensitive, intelligent, but no pedant :
" ' The strongest point of my ambition,' she wrote to her Dublin friend, Mrs. Lefanu, ' is to be every inch a woman. Delighted with the pages of La Voiaier, I dropped the study of chemistry . . . lest I should be thought less the woman. . . . And 1 have studied music as a sentiment rather than a science, and drawing as an amusement rather than an art, lest I should become a musical pedant or a masculine artist.' " Yet this determination, reflected in her heroine's character, did not prevent her from studying all available sources before she wrote her second novel, an historical romance with a background in sixteenth-century France. Mr. Stevenson puts forward the suggestion that this second novel, The Notice of St. Dominick, anticipates the new type of historical novel which was later brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott—a known and warm convert to Sydney Owenson's talents. Similarly, her third novel, The Wild Irish Girl, popularised the new taste for propaganda dressed up as fiction, which had already been heralded by the novels of Godwin, Day and Holcroft. It was written when Robert Emmet's unsuccessful rebellion was still fresh in people's minds, and when the liberal elements in the Whig Party were advising a more lenient administration in Ireland. It aroused the bigoted criticism of John Wilson Croker, who masked his distrust of its political tendentiousness in a ranting attack on its morals. Crolter!s attack gave the novel a. sueces de reelame far beyond its deserts, and elicited numerous' counter-attacks from the Owenson camp. This -exchange ripened into a regular feud, which raged for another twenty odd years and which broke out nearly every time Sydney On-enson published a new book.
The effect of: this reception was to lodge her :firmly in tha radical ranks, and this in . spite of the fact that she. was admitted into the family circle of the Tory Marquis of Aber- corn and was able to hob-nob with Lord, Castlereagh at his parties. She found time, between . amateur theatricals at Kilkenny, literary luncheons at her publisher's,' and soirees at Lady Cork's where she met " everybody," Byron included, to write her fourth novel, Ida of Athens. This novel, again,. was launched a little time before phil-Hellenism became the rage, but its matter was not unfamiliar. Causeries on education drawn from Emil, on the- emotions from Werther, on the vindication of women's rights from Corinne, supported a plot 'which refleete6by implication,-the condition of Ireland. The influence of 'French ideas was even more marked in her next successful .novek. The Missionary, which restated, the psychological problem of Chateaubriand's -Maki. It was only in her sixth novel; O'Donnel,_written after her marriage to Sir Charles Morgan, that she returned openly to her favourite themes and developed them from first-hand kmow- ledge and with considerable From this, time. onwards she moved steadily away from her Gothic predilections and wrote a more masculine hand.. With her husband beside her, she disturbed iiiiery political and literary hornet's nest she could find. The later part of her life was diversified by Continental travel* she voyaged as a little ambassadress of liberalism—by friendships with some of the great and charming figures of .her time,- La Fayette, _Caroline Lamb, Cardinal Consalvi, 'Stendhal, by enmities with others, such as Lady Blessington and Lockhart, and by continued con- troversial writing. r Mr: Stevenson has handled his subject carefully but without pedantry. He allows Sydney Owenson to speak for herself as often as possible, except when she is telling little white lies about her upbringing. He preserves an excellent balance between his, subject and the social background she moved saint with so much apparent ease.. -In short, he is a model biographer. SydneY. Owenson may appear to be an un- worthy object of such delicate and sympathetic attention; But who else in her generation could have claimed to have been rhapsodised over by Shelley, presented with a hygienic, Model garment by Owen, or sat as a model for Thackeray's
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