Lady Morgan
Sydney Owenson , better known as Lady Morgan (born December 25, 1776 in Dublin , † April 14, 1859 in London ) was an Irish poet and writer of the Romantic period .
Life
Sydney Owenson was the eldest daughter of Irish actor Robert Owenson († 1817) and his wife Jane Hill († 1789) from England. After the early death of their mother, Sydney and her younger sister Olivia were forced to support the family financially, first as an educator and later as a writer. Sydney Owenson was one of the few women who completed the Grand Tour .
In 1804 Sydney Owenson published her first novel “St. Clair ” , which sold extremely well. Encouraged by the success, she devoted herself entirely to writing. With her second novel "The Wild Irish Girl" ( 1806 ) Owenson, under the patronage of the Marquis of Abercorn and his third wife, became the darling of Dublin and London society. In 1812 she married the English personal physician of the Marquis, Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, with whom she had two children. After the marriage, she took her husband's name and was henceforth known as Lady Morgan .
In the years that followed, Lady Morgan wrote other novels , essays and travel books - sometimes with her husband - which were also praised by Sir Walter Scott , Percy Bysshe Shelley , Maria Edgeworth , Lord Byron and Thomas Moore . Due to her literary popularity, Lady Morgan was awarded an annual pension of £ 300 for her services to literature and to patriotism by the British government through the then Prime Minister Lord Melbourne in 1837 .
Lady Morgan died at the age of 82 and her remains were interred in Brompton Cemetery, London .
Works (selection)
- 1804 St. Clair
- 1806 The Novice of St. Dominick
- 1806 The Wild Irish Girl
- 1807 Patriotic Sketches and Metrical Fragments
- 1811 The Missionary. Indian Tale
- 1814 O'Donnell
- 1817 France ( digitized in the Internet Archive )
- German-language edition: Travels of Lady Morgan: France (2 vols.), Brockhaus, Leipzig 1821
- 1818 Florence Macarthy. Irish Tale. In Four Volumes ( digitized version of the 1865 edition in one volume in the Internet Archive)
- 1821 Italy. In three volumes
- German-language edition: Travels of Lady Morgan: Italy (4 vol.), Brockhaus, Leipzig 1822/23 (digitized volume 1 , volume 2 and volume 3 on Google Books )
- 1823 Life and Times of Salvator Rosa. In Two Volumes (digitized volume 1 and volume 2 in the Internet Archive)
- 1825 Absenteeism
- 1827 The O'Briens and the O'Flaherties
- 1829 The Book of the Boudoir
- 1830 France in 1829-30. In Two Volumes (digitized volume 1 and volume 2 in the Internet Archive)
- 1833 Dramatic Scenes from Real Life
- 1835 The Princess
- 1840 Woman and her Master
- 1841 The Book without a Name
- 1859 Passages from my Autobiography
( Further digitized works of Lady Morgan’s in the Internet Archive)
Web links
- Literature by and about Sydney Morgan in the catalog of the German National Library
- Morgan, Lady in Damen Conversations Lexikon , Vol. 7 (1836), pp. 288-290 at zeno.org
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lady Morgan |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Owenson, Sydney; Morgan, Sydney |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British writer of Irish descent |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 25, 1776 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dublin |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 14, 1859 |
| Place of death | London |