Sydney Owensen (Dublin c.1783 – London 1859), was born as the daughter of an actor and theatre director whose native command of Gaelic ensured his success in Irish character roles. Young Sydney Owenson had a flamboyant early career and made her playing of the harp (by then becoming a nationally Irish instrument) her trademark. Her The lay of an Irish harp appeared in 1807; her 1805 collection Twelve original Hibernian melodies foreshadowed the Irish melodies of Thomas Moore by three years. Her sentimental-patriotic romance The Wild Irish girl (1806) was one of the first instances of a specifically Irish tradition of prose fiction, and indeed became the prototype of the genre of the Irish “National Tale”.

Following her 1812 marriage to a physician soon thereafter knighted, Owenson continued her career under her married name as “Lady Morgan”. More “National Tales” followed, in an established pattern combining flamboyant sentiment, scenes of high society life, and lurid plot twists often involving Ireland’s (or her characters’) dark past. The author herself, who remained staunchly true to the liberal-Whiggish and Enlightenment-Patriotic principles of her early life, became an object of scorn and derision among reactionary-Conservative reviewers. The household moved from Dublin to London in 1837, where she made her mark as a society hostess until her husband’s death in 1843, and died in 1859, having long outlived the popularity of the genre of the National Tale.

Morgan’s importance, despite her later lack of critical appreciation, lies in the fact that The Wild Irish girl had launched, at a crucial period, the Romantic Irish novel as a vehicle for national idealism (with its successors O’Donnel, 1814; Florence Macarthy, 1818; The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, 1826). Morgan’s National Tales, melodramatic and overblown though they were, delivered their Irish-patriotic message by providing long digressive and celebratory descriptions of landscape and history. These drew on the philosophical travel descriptions and antiquarian disquisitions of the late Enlightenment, which had vindicated Ireland’s civility and character. As the tradition of antiquarianism fissioned between the new, increasingly systematic disciplines of philology, history-writing, and archeology, the National Tale was one of the literary genres perpetuating an interest in Ireland’s cultural past into the new century. Morgan is consequently (together with her counterpart and rival Tom Moore) one of the crucial transition figures between Enlightenment Patriotism and Romantic Nationalism in Ireland.