Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism

Conclusion. The Case of the Love Elegy

237 Conclusion The Case of the Love Elegy The English have had their Collections; so have the Scotch; and both have enriched their publications with Gems from Ireland. We know of nothing before, of this nature, undertaken amongst us; and, in the latter respect, we have been rather more delicate than our neighbours, cautiously avoiding to insert any thing which was not properly of native growth. —“Prefatory Epistle,” in The Shamrock (1772) As we have seen in the preceding chapters, Irish literature is often concertedly international in concern, from John Leslie’s interest in the transatlantic to William Drennan’s in Western geopolitics, to the poetry of Irish migrants and literary depictions of such figures, to national tales set outside of the British Isles, and to the broader corpus of even romantic nationalists, such as The Nation poets. The epigraph to this chapter points to the codependence of such nationalism and internationalism: even this early, preromantic collection of poetry only “of native growth,” The Shamrock, frames its project in terms of the nation’s “neighbours.” Count Camille de Cavour’s analysis of the “problem of Ireland” schematizes what Irish writers had often struggled with in the preceding seven decades: the multiple , and strategic, positionings of Ireland geographically and (most directly through applications of the “four stages theory”) narratively. Part of the literary history of this struggle has been sketched in the preceding chapters: Leslie’s Killarney helps to found a poetic tradition that is in turn taken up by the national tale and then the national 238 • Representing the National Landscape tale’s critics; Edward Ledwich blends topographical and antiquarian description with the Burke-inspired gothic, feeding into Drennan’s “Glendalloch” and thence into depictions of Glendalough across the nineteenth century; Irish poetry of exile revisits the ideological conundrum of the antebellum United States as the “land of Liberty” from the exiles of 1798 to those of 1848, reshaping the century-old figure of the “wild geese” and countering the dominant tradition of grieving nostalgia for the homeland; the Irish gothic contributes to the development of the detective genre in the Anglo-American tradition and comments on English society and European empire; the national tale has a wider interest in European nation building and, in its domestic symbolism, is part of the prehistory of midcentury gothic and sensation fiction as a counterweight to the masculinist lyricism of Young Ireland’s national martyr. Throughout, national tales and gothic fiction and topographical verse—all engaged with questions of land and territory as well as of mobility and migration— weave in and out of the larger fabric of romantic-era Irish literature. The question of nationality—of who does and who does not count as an “Irish” writer—has not been addressed here explicitly, though it has long haunted Irish literary studies, as the epigraph attests. Nearly two centuries after The Shamrock was published, Flann O’Brien complained, “I know of no civilisation to which anything so self-conscious could be indigenous. Why go to the trouble of proving that you are Irish? Who has questioned this notorious fact? If, after all, you are not Irish, who is?”1 Alicia Lefanu, whose work is discussed in two chapters here, lived in England, perhaps for her whole life. She was the niece of Lady Morgan’s Dublin mentor , Alicia Sheridan Lefanu, and of Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who read and admired her early poetic work; she worked with Thomas Moore on his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and he worked on her behalf with publishers. But she is included in this study not because of what we might term her ethnic background and diasporic connections. She is relevant because she engaged with the same literary tradition as the writers discussed here: her novel Henry the Fourth of France clearly builds on Lady Morgan’s second Conclusion • 239 novel, The Novice of Saint Dominick, and The Outlaw alludes to Moore, Mary Tighe, and Morgan’s third novel, The Wild Irish Girl; her biography of her grandmother, Frances Sheridan, a key figure in eighteenth-century Irish literature, is still a staple of scholarship on that novelist and playwright. Alicia Lefanu is thus an interesting case in point. Is she Irish in literary terms rather than political terms? Is she an Irish writer ethnically, in nationalism studies’ sense of “the collective acceptance of a shared self-image,”2 through her participation in a literary...