Sydney Owenson always claimed she was born on a ship crossing the Irish Sea on Christmas Day in 1776. Her father was the actor Robert Owenson (originally MacOwen) of Tirawley, County Mayo. Robert was an Irish-speaking Catholic, but at a time when Catholics couldn’t vote, stand for Parliament, go into professions, buy or inherit land, or teach or study at university, Robert turned Protestant and anglicised his name to advance himself in his chosen career.
After marrying Sydney’s mother, Jane Hill, a middle-class Wesleyan from Shropshire, and producing Sydney and her younger sister, Olivia, Robert settled in Dublin and tried to run a theatre in Fishamble Street. But he was extravagant and unpredictable and the Owensons were always poor. Worse, the authorities took a dim view of Robert’s theatre – a nationalistic effort where Wolfe Tone once trod the boards – and quickly closed it down. Shortly afterwards, Sydney’s mother died and Sydney and Olivia were packed off to a Huguenot boarding school in Clontarf for three years while their father toured the provinces trying to make ends meet.
When she finished school, Sydney went into the usual respectable profession for impecunious middle-class girls – she became a governess, first in Westmeath and then in Tipperary. Contrary to what one might expect, governessing was a happy experience for Sydney. Using her considerable charm to make herself popular with her families, she consequently did hardly any work and instead spent her time improving her mind in their well-stocked libraries. She studied poetry, philosophy and chemistry and, in the evenings, still found time to play and dance jigs for ‘the quality’. She also had leisure enough to write for pleasure, and in 1801 her first book, Poems – a book of forty poems – was published. Her first novel, a romance called St Clair, or the Heiress of Desmond was published in 1803, giving Sydney Owenson her ‘bluestocking’ entrée into the world of letters. Her payment was four copies of her own novel – not much even for the standards of the day – but the book itself was reasonably successful in Ireland and in England. It was at this point that Sydney decided she had had enough of governessing and took herself and her intellectual aspirations to Dublin to break into society.
Sydney had all the necessary accomplishments to achieve her aim: she could write, she spoke French fluently and played the harp beautifully. She was lively and intelligent company with plenty to say. She was mischievous and spirited and, perhaps surprisingly for one who was brought up so closely connected with the less successful end of the theatre world, she had managed to stay out of trouble with unscrupulous men, so she was ‘respectable’. Sydney was not beautiful – her looks were marred by a slight squint and a dropped shoulder – but she knew how to make the best of herself. After all, she had been watching the most famous actresses of the day, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Jordan, since she was a child. ‘I am ambitious,’ she later admitted to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s sister, Alicia Le Fanu, ‘yet the strongest point of my ambition is to be every inch a woman.’ So she painted her face, cut her hair into the latest fashion, knocked several years off her age (she was already twenty-five) and threw herself at Dublin.
Sydney was an immediate success. She got into a circle that included Le Fanu, Mary Tighe and other notable literary women, and continued writing and learning, immersing herself in a study of old Irish music. She quickly produced another romantic novel, The Novice of St Dominick, and travelled to London for the first time to pitch it personally to Richard Phillips, the publisher. Her direct approach worked and the novel was published in 1805.
A nationalist sympathiser like her father, the trip to England made Sydney realise just how much contempt was levelled at Ireland by its prosperous neighbour. After the Act of Union in 1800, which did away with the Irish Parliament, English opinion of Ireland and the Irish was at an all-time low and English newspapers invariably depicted the Irish as apes. At the same time, having taken on Napoleon, English opinion of England was at an all-time high: national arrogance was the order of the day.
It was against this background that Sydney wrote her most famous novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Ostensibly a romance, the story dealt with the question of national Irish identity, emancipation and the richness and antiquity of the indigenous culture. No Dublin publisher would touch the manuscript as it was considered dangerously anti-English. Eventually, it was published by Richard Phillips of London. The book was a runaway success and made Sydney Owenson a literary star. The drubbing it received at the hands of the Tory Establishment was outweighed by the admiration of such heavyweight intellectual critics as Maria Edgeworth. Sydney had achieved her dream – she lived for praise and now she had success, attention and, with her harp and her singing of old Irish songs, she was universally seen as the embodiment of her novel’s heroine, Glorvina, and a symbol of all things Irish.
On the strength of The Wild Irish Girl, Sydney quickly knocked out a successful comic opera featuring her adored father and called The First Attempt or Whim of a Moment. Flawed though he was, Robert Owenson had continued to be a towering male figure in Sydney’s life, and most of her efforts were aimed at bailing him out. Around this time she also showed her more intellectual side by publishing a serious polemic, Patriotic Sketches, which discussed the social and political problems of the day.
In 1808, fresh from Dublin success, Sydney presented herself to Regency London and was a success there too. She may have had little money but she did have the best Dublin contacts, and through them she met many of the leading names of the day, including Lord Byron, the actor Richard Kemble and the eccentric Ladies of Llangollen. The following year she completed another novel – this time set in Greece, a place she had never even visited – called Ida of Athens (1809).
Sydney left London and returned home to Ireland, where she was taken up by the fashionable marquis and marchioness of Abercorn. They installed her in their grand home, Baron’s Court in County Tyrone, as a writer-in-residence, and she obliged them by churning out The Missionary (1811). Soon it became clear that the Abercorns wanted to set Sydney up in more ways than one – they introduced her to their new family physician, Charles Morgan, who just happened to be a young eligible widower.
Sydney was a flirt and had been all her life. She had an army of suitors and one on-off long-term lover, Sir Charles Ormsby, a widowed barrister old enough to be her father. She had finally broken off with Sir Charles at the beginning of her tenure with the Abercorns and, by now in her mid-thirties (although she would never have admitted it), her patrons were pressing her to settle down. Sydney, however, was a feisty soul who had struggled a long time to become an overnight success. Naturally she looked askance at the sacrifices that marriage to Charles Morgan would entail – being continually in the orbit of the fabulously wealthy Abercorns, for example, who, although kind, had an annoying tendency to refer to her as ‘little Owenson’ and treat her as an exotic pet. Despite these objections, and after some prevarication and an extended break away from the Abercorns, Sydney Owenson and the recently knighted Sir Charles Morgan were married quietly in January 1812 at Baron’s Court.
The marriage was a great success. Sydney’s father’s death shortly afterwards removed a major impediment to a committed and mature relationship with her husband, whom she later described as her ‘most dear and true friend’. Sydney and Sir Charles extricated themselves from the Abercorns and established a home in fashionable Kildare Street, Dublin, where they started a popular literary salon – the only one in Ireland at that time.
In 1814 Sydney published O’Donnel, another novel with a strong female lead and a barely veiled argument for Catholic emancipation. This book estranged her from some members of the Ascendancy who did not appreciate the views of their one-time pet, nevertheless O’Donnel was another bestseller. In terms of the wider campaign for religious emancipation and national independence, Sydney was later to downplay her writing as merely ‘the nibbling of the mouse at the lion’s net’, but, in fact, as the author and academic Maria Luddy points out, her novels formed part of the ‘propaganda war of the [emancipation] campaign’.
In 1816, with encouragement from her new publisher, Henry Colburn, Sydney went to France to research a new book, France. This was to be a journalistic work reporting on life in the country after the restoration of Louis XVIII to the monarchy. France was published in 1817 and its liberalism, anticlericalism and disparagement of the sovereign caused an uproar. The following year Colburn published Florence Macarthy, a nationalist and feminist novel of contemporary Ireland, and after that Sydney and Sir Charles went travelling to research her next book, Italy.
Stationed en route in a fashionable part of Paris, Sydney spent every Wednesday hosting her now-famous literary salons, then it was off across the Alps to Italy. After two years of travel and research, the Morgans returned to Dublin to write the book. When it was published in 1821 it provoked more of an uproar than France, albeit for the same reasons. Not for nothing did Lord Byron call this book ‘fearless’; this time it was banned by the Pope himself.
Sydney spent the 1820s as Dublin’s main literary hostess in what she called her ‘snuggery’ in Kildare Street. When she was not travelling or developing her reputation as a brilliant and witty conversationalist, she was still producing bestsellers, including The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties (1827). Sydney welcomed Catholic emancipation in 1829, but she became disillusioned with Daniel O’Connell, whom she regarded less as a liberator and more as an opportunist.
In 1837 Sydney was granted a government literary pension of £300 per year, the first of its kind offered to a woman (nearly fifty years later, Lady Wilde would receive only £100 per year). However, she and her husband had become disenchanted with Dublin and in the same year they moved permanently to Belgravia, London.
Sydney enjoyed London, but she fell prey to all the afflictions of the elderly, such as a fast-shrinking social circle. In 1843 she suffered the greatest blow of all when she lost her darling husband and co-writer to heart disease: ‘So ends my life,’ she wrote despairingly. Just two years later, in 1845, Olivia, her only sister, died.
Alone again, Sydney resolutely re-entered society, kept busy and was welcomed everywhere. A popular old celebrity to the last, she threw her own St Patrick’s Day party in 1851, at which she caught a cold. Maintaining that for her the world ‘had been a good world’, she died a month later and was buried in Brompton cemetery, London.