THE REGIONS OF PURER INTELLECT

In Lady Morgan's Manor Sackville (1833), the Sheriff Job Blackacre comes up with a strange and interesting way of criticizing the opinions of Sackville, a zealous reformer and English lord of a manor in Blackacre's county in Ireland. “Your English notions are very amiable,” he says, “and what you call the philosophy of politics sounds very well in an Edinburgh Review, or a national novel; but such views and principles are utterly inapplicable in this country.” Manor Sackville is not in fact a national novel or a “national tale” (a term also used by Morgan and now favored by critics), but one of the author's Dramatic Scenes – a seldom-discussed series of works consisting of dialogue and stage direction. Along with the other works in the collection, it launches a recognizable generic departure for Morgan from the Irish national tale which she developed along with writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Charles Robert Maturin. It also offers some pointed explanation for that departure by making Sackville resemble an author of national tales – often voicing opinions identifiable as Morgan's – and by making Blackacre into a canny critic of the genre. The national tale itself, the Sheriff implies, represents an awkward attempt to apply “English notions,” typified by the Whig political philosophy of The Edinburgh Review, to an Irish nation where they are “utterly inapplicable.”