Irish Incognitos: Transnational Mobility in the National Tales of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson

Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and Sydney Owenson (1783?–1859) have enjoyed renewed critical attention in the last decade, largely stemming from each author’s contribution to Ireland’s signature genre, the national tale. Simultaneously a minor fictional form and a major cultural response to the Act of Union (1800), the national tales of Edgeworth and Owenson are also responsive to languages, cultures, and nations beyond Irish shores. Given the heightened scholarly attention to the two authors’ initial forays in the genre—Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806)—it is easy to forget this international focus, as well as how their early examples both display and disturb preconceived notions of an “authentic” Ireland for British readers beginning to reacquaint themselves with a neighboring island.

Although critics of the national tale have noted the genre’s “explicit response to the Irish tour” and its affinity to travel writing, comparatively little attention has been directed to this narrative focus or to the significance of native Irish, rather than English or Anglo-Irish, travelers in these works.¹ Nineteenth-century travel writers, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, imparted “a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity” with respect to new landscapes and cultures (3). But mobile Irish protagonists perform quite differently and convey a distinctive message about travelers and their place in the world. Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth’s satirical tale “The Irish Incognito,” the penultimate chapter of An Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), illuminates the significance of Irish mobility in the national tale by introducing a persistent motif that captures the unstable, composite, and provisional state of Irishness following the Act of Union. Examining “The Irish Incognito”; Edgeworth’s last Irish work, Ormond (1817); and Owenson’s O’Donnel (1814), this essay argues that mobile Irish characters (“Irish incognitos”) remind readers of the incomplete business of unification. Irish characters’ orality—vocal mimicry, singing, adaptive accents, and multilingualism—serves as a marker of their mobility. Yet instead of reinforcing stereotypes (whether positive or negative) of the Celt, such characters contribute to a composite portrait of Irish men and women as cosmopolitan citizens of the world.

The life choices and travel patterns of Edgeworth and Owenson undoubtedly influenced their shared interest in such figures. Although deeply concerned with Ireland and its history in distinctive ways, both were also active participants in British and Continental culture. Edgeworth translated the writings of Mme de Genlis, traveled, and met intellectuals and educationalists on her visits to France and Switzerland.² She also privately experimented with travel writing by penning a version of the home tour in A Tour in Connemara (1833–34, first published in 1950).³ Owenson traveled much more extensively throughout the Continent and published three book-length travel narratives that generated both controversy and lucrative publicity for her writings by revealing her liberal sympathies.⁴

Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s gender, moreover, helps to explain why two contemporary authors characterized by such different styles and politics would gravitate to the national tale and to the motif of Irish mobility. Clíona Ó Gallchoir suggests that whereas both Irishness and femininity existed as “unstable positions” in the postrevolutionary, post-Union period, these doubly liminal roles offered each author “the potential to construct a position of unprecedented authority for the woman writer” (7). And as Ina Ferris explains, just as their gender troubled some of their audience, so too their national tales “unsettled” readers by “straying beyond the conventional borders of fiction” and “targeting landlords and legislators rather than ‘fair readers’ or idle youths” in their fiction (“Irish Novel” 236). Less well understood is how mobile protagonists, who were performative and discursive, contributed to each author’s broader arguments about the unstable position of Ireland and of women—either as subjects or as authors. By incorporating Irish characters who frequently travel into their narratives, Edgeworth and Owenson turned to a growing social practice following Union—the home tour and the Grand Tour. These new patterns of travel enabled them to explore not only Ireland...