Lady Morgan was born Sydney Owenson, oldest daughter of Robert Owenson, a roving Irish actor, and Jane Hill, a English Protestant whom Robert met while on tour. Sydney's date of birth is conventionally noted as December 25, 1776 on the passage across the Irish Sea from Holyhead to Dublin, but her actual date of birth is unknown due to her lifelong refusal to disclose it.

Sydney and her younger sister Olivia received a scattered education at a series of boarding and finishing schools after their mother's death in 1789. Robert Owenson worked with acting companies all across Ireland to support them, but during a prolonged state of unemployment, Sydney was forced to become the family breadwinner: first as a governess and later as an author. She published her first novel at the age of 21 - St. Clair, or The Heiress of Desmond, which achieved enough success to allow her to devote herself entirely to writing.

In 1806, Sydney's second novel The Wild Irish Girl was published. Its instantly enormous success propelled her to the top of literary and social circles both in Dublin and London. Her vivacious personality and shrewd wit made her a favorite among the idle upper classes in England where she came under the patronage of the Marquis and Marchioness of Abercorn. It was at their estate at Baron's Court that Sydney met Charles Morgan, an Englishman and the Marquis' personal physician. After a prolonged engagement, during which time Charles was knighted for his services, Sydney married Sir Charles Morgan and the couple moved to Dublin. She continued to write novels, essays and travel books (sometimes collaborating with her husband) well into the 19th Century and her works were read and praised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, and Lord Byron who, in a letter to the poet Thomas Moore referred to her Italy as "fearless and excellent on the subject of Italy."

Sydney's nationalistic novels - O'Donnel (1814), Florence Macarthy (1818), and The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys (1827) in addition to The Wild Irish Girl, were wildly popular in England despite their controversial themes of Irish Independence and Catholic Emancipation, views which left the Morgans under permanent surveillance by the British secret police. In fact, their house at No. 35 Kildare Street (now No. 39) was a known meeting place for the young liberals of Dublin, and was consistently watched and monitored by the government. Her travel books on France (1817 and 1830) and Italy (1821) were considered to have pro-Revolutionary ideas and to promote radical politics, and though the critics and the British government tried to censor her voice with vicious establishment-backed criticisms of her works (the most famous of which appeared in the Quarterly Review and were "anonymously" penned by John Wilson Croker, her most consistent critic), she remained wildly popular both at home and abroad. Sydney's continued literary popularity was such that in 1837 she became the first woman writer to ever receive a literary pension from the British government for her 'services to literature and to patriotism.' For a complete listing of Sydney Owenson's works, click here.

Unfortunately, today the works of Sydney Owenson are almost entirely out of print. Her books are buried in obscurity or packed away in Special Collection library vaults, inaccessesible to the general public. Thus the need for online access to her works. In her biography of Lady Morgan, Mary Campbell best sums up this senitment:

"All through her professional life she was attacked by powerful and influential critics, not so much for her literary lapses as for her Whiggish and Jacobin opinions. And all through her life she fought them valiantly, and they could dent neither her spirit nor her popularity. But now that she is dead, it is a very different story. Eminent literary historians since her death have either ignored her or dismissed her as a footnote in literature. And today she has more or less been written off. One Irish writer has recently - without giving evidence to support his claim - called her 'a trashy novelist.' These generalisations are as unfair now as was the criticism she suffered when she was alive - for having too much significance! For the sake of literary history it is necessary to understand why she was considered so important in her own time and, in spite of her relegation to the ranks of writers now deemed obsolete, how much she can still contribute to an understanding of the social, political and religious problems that still bedevil Ireland today. Her 'national' tales analysed the conflicts in Irish society then which led eventually to the troubles of all the ensuing years, and her advocacy of justice and tolerance might still be heeded with some better results."

Lady Morgan: the life and times of Sydney Owenson by Mary Campbell

HOME PAGE