Irishness and Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (review)

Thomas Tracy's study of novels by Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope analyzes Britishness in the nineteenth century as a cultural program that is both dependent upon and disrupted by figurations of Irishness and womanhood. The central argument, that the representation of Irish women plays a special role in the making of Britishness, holds up well. The focus on gender is welcome and especially fruitful in the readings of Edgeworth and Owenson, where Tracy's methodology intersects with texts that express a deep and complex relationship with the themes of his study.

The main burden of the argument of Irishness and Womanhood is carried via analyses of the above novelists. The book proposes a genealogy of gender and nation that links Edgeworth and Owenson to fictions by Trollope and Thackeray via James Kay's The Moral and Phyiscal Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1844), and literary reviews by John Wilson Croker. Baldly stated, this list of texts can seem random. Tracy does, however, forge links between his selected novels and reports via their shared inscriptions of Irishness and womanhood. Edgeworth's and Owenson's texts are taken to be foundational and assumed to have influenced public debate and even policy. The lines of connection between fictional explorations of identity and the realpolitik of the nineteenth-century British state can, however, seem tenuous. The continuity of plots, themes, and images from Edgeworth and Owenson through Thackeray and Trollope is convincing; the role of their novels and tales in influencing the treatment of Irish immigrants in Victorian Britain less so. Chapters 5 and 6, which effect a transition from novels set in Ireland to the material conditions of Irish migrants in Britain as registered in reports and commentaries, are weaker than other parts of the book.

In an opening chapter entitled "A Long Conversation," Tracy outlines the contours of "a dialogue on Union engaged by many influential commentators," including, as already indicated, "Maria Edgeworth, James Kay Shuttleworth, George Cornewall Lewis, Friedrich Engels, Edmund Burke, John Croker, William Makepace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope" (2). The expansive range of names is welcome, as is the concept of conversation itself, which I understand to be in implicit opposition to monologic understandings of either British or Irish culture in the period. Yet the book as a whole is dependent on a version of postcolonial theory that teaches us to read British commentators on Ireland as practicing a form of Orientalism. The interconnectedness of the story that Tracy tells—with its braiding of Britishness and Irishness in the lives and writings of key figures—already undoes such an assumption, while an engagement with the extensive scholarship on Ireland and empire might have added nuance to the overall case. The readings offered are happily more responsive to the complexities of life under the Union than some of the balder statements of the book's overall thesis would suggest.

Tracy follows much recent criticism of the national tale in finding Owenson to be more congenial company than Edgeworth. Tracy reads The Wild Irish Girl (1806) as only partially committed to the project of Union and locates within its gender politics the possibility of a "more inclusive and expansive conception of British national identity" (19). The analysis of femininity and masculinity makes very good use of Owenson's literary sources, in particular Shakespeare's Henriad (1597-1600). (The Henry plays surface again in a very strong reading of Trollope.) Given the interest in allusions, however, it is surprising to see scarcely any use made of the post-1990s scholarly editions of Edgeworth and Owenson. The strongest chapter consists of a reading of Florence Macarthy (1818), which stresses Owenson's avowal of European political ideals and notices the ambivalent use of romance modes in a novel that is sometimes thought of as simply...