ABSTRACT
In her novel Florence McCarthy (1818), Lady Morgan mounts a challenge on numerous levels to the social vision expressed in Ormond. Like Ormond, Florence McCarthy allegorizes the achievement of social harmony by means of a marriage plot involving the title character. Lady Clancare is a multi-faceted heroine who expands traditionally feminine attributes beyond an Edgworthian domesticity into public virtues. Lady Morgan furthermore characterizes the cause as Anglo-Irish misrule, which colonial policy not only fails to provide checks upon but worse, protects and sustains. Anglo-Irish society is itself represented as multifarious and layered, and the obstacles to its reformation are portrayed as systemic. The idealized solution Lady Morgan proposes is an integrated Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish aristocracy and a removal of the legal and social restrictions placed upon the preponderantly Catholic and Gaelic population of Ireland. Lady Morgan's program attempts to imagine a national cultural identity other than as a type of ethnically pure hegemony augmented by cultural appropriation, as in Edgeworth.
