Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan

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Standard Name: Morgan, Sydney Owenson,,, Lady
Birth Name: Sydney Owenson
Titled: Lady Sydney Owenson
Married Name: Lady Sydney Morgan
Pseudonym: S. O.
Nickname: Glorvina
Nickname: The Wild Irish Girl
In her capacities as poet, novelist, and travel writer with a sharp eye for culture and politics, SOLM spoke for the early movement of Irish nationalism. She also wrote plays and verse. Her reputation, once dragged down by her politics, is now rising.
Full-length portrait of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, by René Théodore Berthon, c. 1818. She sits in an ornate chair, with an elbow on a desk bearing paper, an inkwell, and a vase of flowers; her head rests pensively on her hand. She is wearing a black Empire-style dress with short puff sleeves, and holding a quill pen. A blue mantle with plentiful white fur trim is thrown carelessly on her chair. National Gallery of Ireland.
Title-page of "Miss Owenson" (later Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan)'s "The Lay of an Irish Harp or Metrical Fragments", New York, 1808 (the year after it appeared in England). The page features an over-sized Irish harp resting against what must be intended as a weeping willow.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Though these works were less generally admired in England than her pedagogical ones, SFG continued to command leading reviews in English periodicals throughout her life.
Dow, Gillian. “Genuine ’Genuine Anecdotes’: an émigré novel in 1790s Britain”. British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) 35th Annual Conference, Oxford, 4 Jan. 2006.
Her Mademoiselle de Clermont, 1802, was particularly highly regarded...
Literary responses Maria Edgeworth
The Critical Review notice on Leonora began with oblique reference to Elizabeth Hamilton 's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
3d ser. 7 (1806): 215
It judged that the whole novel is written with great spirit...
Literary responses Rosina Bulwer Lytton Baroness Lytton
Her husband, Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer Lytton) , was embarrassed by Cheveley, seeing himself in the portrait of Lord De Clifford and his predilection for governesses,
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
119
and tried to block the novel's production...
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
SFG 's importance to the influential Mary Wollstonecraft can be gauged from the way that Wollstonecraft used and built on her writings, recommended them, measured others by their standard, and also did not hesitate to...
Literary responses Anne Katharine Elwood
The reviews for Elwood's second publication were more positive than for her first: John Bull declared that each biography was marked by good taste and excellent judgement.
qtd. in
Allibone, S. Austin, editor. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased. Gale Research, 1965.
In reviewing Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of...
Literary responses Mary Martin
In his review in the Athenæum, H. F. Chorley detected the strong influence of Lady Morgan on the characters and action of this novel.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1184 (1850): 707
He commented also on the novel's use...
Literary responses Georgiana Chatterton
The book had the honour of being reviewed for the Athenæum by Sydney Morgan .
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Morgan, anonymous like all Athenæum reviewers, seems at first to be distancing herself from the author in terms of gender...
Literary responses Mary Russell Mitford
The Quarterly began its notice with heavy condescension: We have no passion for breaking a butterfly upon the wheel, and should not notice this little volume, if we were not on the whole pleased with...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
Morgan nonetheless reported that in 1841 the fashionable world was sneering and mangling over
qtd. in
Morgan, Sydney Owenson, Lady. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs. Editors Dixon, William Hepworth and Geraldine Jewsbury, AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
2: 466
this recognisable literary character. Her review of The Dowager for the Athenæum was one of a series in which...
Literary responses Harriett Jay
Response to the novel was mixed. The Academy criticized it as heavily derivative of William Hamilton Maxwell 's Wild Sports of the West and (oddly) from Sydney Morgan 's strongly pro-Irish The Wild Irish Girl...
Literary responses Harriette Wilson
The Memoirs immediately produced extraordinary sensations in fashionable life,
qtd. in
Wilson, Frances. The Courtesan’s Revenge. Faber, 2003.
199
with anguished responses from ex-lovers and moralists, as well as from people in the book trade and people in HW 's own sex trade. Crowds...
Literary responses Lady Caroline Lamb
Reviewers were anything but indifferent. The New Monthly Magazine thought the title character ably and vigorously drawn and the book therefore a moral one: a fearful beacon to warn the young and inexperienced. But the...
Literary responses Lady Caroline Lamb
From the date of Byron's death, LCL lived with a constant succession of revelations in celebrity memoirs, which often contained something hurtful to herself. Thomas Medwin , whom she respected as a truth-teller, printed an...
Literary responses Jane West
Unlike JW 's two previous works, this one was reviewed in the Quarterly Magazine and elsewhere.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
2: 373
David Thame believes that this and West's next novel represent a substantial change of register from gossiping...
Literary responses Emily Lawless
The Literary World vividly likened experiencing this novel to reading the life of a past century by lightning flashes, and the half-blinded reader reads on and on and cannot stop or look away short of...

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