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“GREATLY ALTERED”: THE LIFE OF SYDNEY OWENSON'S INDIAN NOVEL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

Cóilín Parsons
Cóilín Parsons*
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Extract

In the last months of her life, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) returned to one of her earliest and most popular works, The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and devoted time between attacks of severe bronchitis to revising it. The revised novel was published in 1859 under the name of Luxima, the Prophetess: A Tale of India. According to the unattributed preface to Luxima it was “greatly altered,” receiving the final touches only a few days before Owenson's death on April 16, 1859 (Luxima iii; preface). The revisions are extensive. Most prominent of all is the excision of tracts of particularly purple prose, and the reining in of some of the elements that mark The Missionary as a novel of sensibility. These changes were considered prudent even in 1811: an otherwise complimentary notice on The Missionary in Critical Review urges the author to “divest her style of its luxuriant redundancies, and to write in a more simple and natural manner.” Another reviewer styled the novel “outrageously romantic” (qtd. in Missionary 298). Yet despite recent critical consensus that Owenson's 1859 revisions were for the most part cosmetic, it seems unlikely that in her death throes Owenson spent sleepless nights worrying about lukewarm reviews of a novel she had written over forty years earlier.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 373 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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