Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Abstract

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