2024 read #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.