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.