Revolution and Romanticism

A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth

ISBN 185477 189 2

245 x 175mm
798 as 210 pages

This is a long novel, published originally in three volumes. To keep the selling price within bounds we have used a large page size, each page containing four pages of the original with the type size slightly reduced.

SYDNEY OWENSON (LADY MORGAN)

The Wild Irish Girl 1807

Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan, was brought up in Dublin, wrote poems and novels, and attracted attention with her singing, dancing and harp-playing. The Wild Irish Girl, first published in 1806, is a ‘national tale’, combining with its fictional story autobiographical elements and footnoted documentary material about Irish history, Irish mythology, and the problems of rural Ireland, especially those to do with absentee landlords. It excited the fury of Tory critics, notably John Wilson Croker, and it stimulated Charles Maturin into writing his Wild Irish Boy (1808) by way of reply. Though her later years were less successful, she remained a literary celebrity. She died in 1859.

£48 $85

At the moment when The Wild Irish Girl appeared, it was dangerous to write on Ireland, hazardous to praise her, and difficult to find a publisher for an Irish tale which had a political tendency. Graves were then still green, where the victims of laws uselessly violated were wept over by broken hearts.
(Sydney Owenson writing in 1846)



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Poetry of the 1890s