Born: 25 December 1781, Ireland
Died: 14 April 1859
Country most active: Ireland, United Kingdom
Also known as: Sydney Owenson, Glorvina
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Lady Sydney Morgan, an Irish novelist, born in Dublin, daughter of Robert Owenson, an actor.
She began her career with a precocious volume of poems, and collected Irish tunes, for which she composed the words, thus setting a fashion adopted later by Thomas Moore and Stevenson. Her first novel St. Clair, in which the influence of Goethe and Rousseau was apparent, at once attracted attention, but the book which made her reputation and brought her name into warm controversy was The Wild Irish Girl (1806) in which she appeared as the ardent champion of her native country, a politician rather than a novelist, extolling the beauty of Ireland, and the noble traditions of its early history.
Having secured a high position in fashionable and literary life, she removed from Dublin to London, and in 1812 was married to Sir Charles Morgan, an eminent physician.
But books continued to flow from her facile pen, and in 1817 she published her elaborate study of France under the Bourbon restoration. It was attacked with fury in the Quarterly reviewer is insulted with supreme feminine ingenuity.
Lady Morgan wrote many other books and was one of the most vivid and hotly discussed literary figures of her generation.