ABSTRACT
The Anglo-Irish Croker's attack invests the political values of Lady Morgan's position with a distinctly sexual charge. Croker was responding rather to the enormous popularity and influence of the ideals expressed in Lady Morgan's earlier novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806). In it, Lady Morgan created a powerful heroine who embodied Irish nationhood and who, through her union with the English hero, represented a re-imagined distribution of power between Britain and Ireland, as well as between men and women. Written at the time of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, in which the interests of both the Anglo-Irish Patriot Party and the Catholic majority of Ireland were subordinated to the primary British interests of simultaneously containing Napoleonic aggression and Irish republicanism. In the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope, an increased pessimism regarding assimilation similar to Thackeray's is traceable. Trollope attributes much of the responsibility for the deteriorating prospects of a successful Union to the British.
