Sir Walter Scott is said to have named his daughter Sophia's donkey “Lady Morgan,” a gesture that might be read (depending on one's feelings about donkeys) as an overdetermined disavowal of Scott's considerable indebtedness to Morgan's “national tales” in the creation of his own popular entries into the genre. Like many a bourgeois Briton of his time, Scott found it easier publicly to admire Morgan's more genteel contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, whose influence he acknowledged in the postscript to Waverley (1814). Syndey Owenson, who would come to be known as Lady Morgan, represented in the nineteenth-century British imagination all that was not just feminine but problematically feminine about Irishness. As Ina Ferris has put it, “the figure of Morgan's authorship—aggravating, indecorous, sprawling—tended to double that of the nation itself” (The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland [Cambridge, 2009], 70). This recalcitrant, slatternly version of womanhood is what Thomas Tracy sees as “the threat of Irish anti-domesticity,” not only a literary trope but also a determining factor in nineteenth-century British public policy.

Tracy's study opens with an 1809 review of Morgan's novel, Woman: or Ida of Athens (1800), by John Wilson Croker, a review that typifies Croker's practice when reviewing Morgan, that is, to “focus on the themes of sexual anarchy and gender deviances” (1). Croker, as Tracy observes, “equates the progressive political and social vision [Morgan] expresses with socio-sexual impropriety” (1). Tracy locates the source of related trends in both mid-nineteenth-century political discourse and later nineteenth-century literature, when it comes to the deployment of Irishness in British public discourse, in an early century dialogue between the novels of the “dangerous” Morgan, who envisioned an Ireland of radical sexual and sectarian equality, and Edgeworth, Ascendancy daughter and advocate for England's paternalistic rule over the unruly, childlike Irish. Specifically, Tracy tracks, beginning with the work of these two novelists, “the coding through the century of Irishness as the antithesis of an idealized British national identity, and a general inability to see Ireland and the Irish through anything other than a colonial lens” (10). One of the limits of Tracy's own analysis, however, is to see colonialism through a strictly culturalist lens, despite attempts to bring into the discussion contemporary debates about social engineering and political economy.

Tracy articulates his own purpose as being “to demonstrate the power and extent of a pattern which crosses temporal political and discursive boundaries and in which the construction of British national identity centers upon the representation of Irish woman” (14). After lengthy and useful analysis of the tension between the novels of Edgeworth and Morgan, an analysis that persuasively demonstrates the interactions between specific texts and brings to dynamic life the ongoing debate already mentioned, the “pattern” of Tracy's discussion changes to look at Parliamentary Committee Reports of the 1830s and the writings of Friedrich Engels and of social reformer James Kay concerning the “problem” of the Irish in England. These texts are evoked in order to demonstrate that “Irishness figured even more prominently as a signifier in the political debates over the management of British industrial expansion in the aftermath of Lady Morgan and Edgeworth's ‘dialogue’” (65). Why these two writers are singled out with no reference to any of the other significant figures writing similarly on the same subject at around the same time, such as Mountifort Longfield, R. D. Collison Black, or Nassau Senior, to name just a few, is not clear and unnecessarily weakens a potentially fruitful argument. There is a reference, though a surprisingly fleeting one considering the subject matter, to Thomas Carlyle, who is, oddly, presented as a critic of English policy with no acknowledgment of his vitriolic anti-Irish bias. Some of the problems plaguing this middle section might have been avoided had Tracy consulted two works of crucial importance to his discussion, neither of which appear in the bibliography: Gordon Bigelow's Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2003) and Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1992) by Thomas Boylan and Timothy Foley.

A similarly cursory treatment characterizes the last section, which focuses on the work of two later British novelists who often took on Irish subjects, William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Again, apart from a single line quoted from a review by Thackeray critical of the work of Charles Lever and Arthur Lover, there is little reference to pertinent literary contemporaries. Where, in this discussion of representations of Irishness in British culture, are the novels of Lover and Lever, of the Banim brothers, of Gerald Griffin, of William Carleton? That a book that begins by considering two great Irish women neglects to mention other women writers in this concluding section is disappointing. For example, it would seem that Bridget O'Brien, from Emily Lawless's Hurrish (1886), a bloodthirsty Madame Defarge–like mother responsible for egging on her son to rebellion, supports many of Tracy's contentions. Even in the discussion of Trollope and Thackeray, it is curious that Thackeray's parody of Lady Morgan in Vanity Fair (1848) is not mentioned and that two of Trollope's novels on the “Irish Question,” Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874), make virtually no appearance.

Tracy's central argument, that enduring stereotypes of Irish “anti-domesticity,” especially as embodied in the Irish mother, reflected in and abetted by literary representations of the Irish, informed nineteenth-century British policy—not only in responding to the vexing “Irish Question” but also in the formation of domestic policy, for example, in the establishment of the national police force in England's newly industrialized urban centers—is a potentially powerful one. The figure of the Irish mother as “the engine of moral contagion” (69) has been a constant in British colonial discourse since at least Edmund Spenser, whose View of the Present State of Ireland warned against the dangers of allowing Irish women to nurse English children and also provided a memorable picture of the monstrous foster mother of rebel Morrough O'Brien lapping up her son's blood at his execution. The evolution of this figure and the political uses to which it was put over the course of the nineteenth century is a worthwhile project, but chronological gaps and a limited scope of reference render the book's argument suspect, vulnerable to the charge of special pleading, so that its stimulating and admirable aims remain only partially achieved.