Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Abstract

Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish traveller
and travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogue
Italy (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputation
she had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl, 1806) and
a socio-political writer (France, 1817), left a mark on Italy and on the
understanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helped
disseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irish
public opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domestic
autocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve the
cause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home country
under her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determination
concerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusual
for a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’s
radical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her original
methods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double,
feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation with
apparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of society
news, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting on
social and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history,
Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources from
which she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came to
obtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aim
of this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’s
sojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, the
activities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed.