Tales of a Nation: Territorial Pragmatism in Elizabeth Grant, Maria Edgeworth, And Sydney Owenson‪.‬

Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus (1797-1885) was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Scotland and England. She spent some time in India, where she married an Anglo-Irish landowner, Colonel Henry Smith. The couple moved to Ireland in 1830. Grant--or Smith--was a prolific diarist. (1) The first decade of her massive output, as edited by Patricia Pelly and Andrew Tod in The Highland Lady in Ireland (1991), tells of her life on her husband's Wicklow estate, Baltiboys, in the years before, during, and after the 1840s Famine. (2) Since it covers the Famine years in considerable detail, her journal has achieved some popularity as a historical source. (3) Grant is also rising to prominence as a diarist and travel writer in Scottish literary criticism. (4) My essay will begin by examining Grant's fictionalization of territoriality (or, more specifically, nationality). The Highland Lady in Ireland destabilizes the category of 'Irishness' by means of philosophical inconsistencies. The diary entries--this does not necessarily involve authorial intention--alternately reinforce and subvert established concepts. They constitute pragmatic responses to various concrete situations, rather than a coherent approach to the question of nationality. The diaries in their entirety neither make it clear what the origins of 'Irishness' are nor what 'Irishness' means. Answers to these questions are legion, but they are always situationally specific. Concepts of Irishness arise out of individual contexts; and the concepts as well as the contexts are variable. In the second part of the essay, I shall discuss the implications of Grant's pragmatism for representations of Ireland in two novels of the early nineteenth century: Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl, and Maria Edgeworth's Ormond. I shall argue that the pragmatism which characterizes Grant's diaries is not only worth analysing in itself but can also contribute to a rethinking of the meanings of Ireland in these much-discussed fictional texts.