Morgan, Sydney (1780–1859)

Irish novelist. Name variations: Miss Sydney Owenson; Lady Morgan. Born Sydney Owenson near Dublin, Ireland, on Christmas Day in 1780 (some sources cite 1783); died on April 14, 1859; daughter of Robert Owenson (an actor) and a mother, name unknown (the daughter of an English tradesman); worked as a governess (1798–1800); married Sir Charles Morgan (an eminent physician), in 1812; no children.

Lady Sydney Morgan was born Sydney Owenson in 1780 in Dublin, Ireland. In her early years, for the most part, she was brought up backstage by her actor father Robert Owenson. Morgan began her professional writing career at 21 with a volume of poems (1801) and a collection of Irish tunes, for which she composed the words, setting a trend that would later be adopted by Thomas Moore. Her first novel St. Clair (1804), heavily influenced by the work of Goethe and Rousseau, attracted immediate attention, but the book which made her reputation and brought her controversy was The Wild Irish Girl (1806). In it, she appeared as an ardent champion of her native country, a politician rather than a novelist, extolling the beauty of Irish scenery, the richness of the natural wealth of Ireland, and the noble traditions of its early history.

Having secured a high position in fashionable and literary society, she moved from Dublin to London and in 1812 married Sir Charles Morgan, an eminent physician. Books continued to flow from her pen, and in 1817 she published her detailed study of France under the Bourbon restoration. After it was angrily attacked in the Tory Quarterly Review, Morgan took her revenge indirectly in the novel Florence MaCarthy (1819), in which a Quarterly reviewer is imaginatively insulted. Sydney Morgan wrote many other books and was one of the most vivid and hotly discussed literary figures of her generation.

suggested reading:

Dixon, W.H., ed. Lady Morgan's Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence.

Fitzpatrick, W.J. Lady Morgan: Her Career, Literary and Personal.