Imperfect Concord: Spectres of History in the Irish Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan ANNE FOGARTY The dual modes of realism and romance are frequently used as a convenient means of charting opposing tendencies in the history of the novel. At first glance, the work of Maria Edgeworth and of Lady Morgan would appear to illustrate these polarities. Where Edgeworth spearheads the use of naturalism and of social realism in her rational fictions about Ireland, Lady Morgan by contrast initiates and promotes a romantic and mythical view of the country and its history in her novels.' Edgeworth's highlighting of the intricacies of social interaction cede to a rival emphasis in the work of Lady Morgan on the alluring but threatening sublimity of the Irish landscape and of its inhabitants. On closer inspection, however, this neat dichotomy breaks down. This essay aims to trace the continuities and differences between two novels by these interrelated writers which were published in the aftermath of the Act of Union in 18oi.The texts which I shall examine are Maria Edgeworth's TheAbsentee (1812) and Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806).2 I shall argue that the initial counterpoint between the enlightened utopianism of Edgeworth and the Gothic romanticism of Lady Morgan masks the shared political and aesthetic concerns of their work. In thus cross-comparing and picking out points of connection between their novels, my purpose is to consider the difficulties which both writers encounter in simultaneously depicting the vicissitudes and conflicts of Irish history whilst yet outlining a resolution of the political problems of the country. I shall make the case that the attempt by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan to write totalising fictions which use a moment of social concord to achieve a form of closure is countermanded by the contradictions and conflicts in Irish society which their work exposes. My argument will be not so much that their imaginations and political sympathies are at odds, as critics frequently contend, but that their very means of envisioning and emplotting Irish colonial history and its fateful consequences are themselves divided and riven.3 Both writers, it x For an account of the philosophical underpinnings of the work of these writers, see Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth:A Literary Biography (Oxford, 1972) and J.T. Leerssen, 'How The Wild Irish Girl Made Ireland Romantic' in Dutch Quarterly Review, 18 (1988), pp. 209-27. 2 TheAbsentee, edited byWJ. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford, 1988); The Wild Irish Girl (London, 1986). 3 Terry Eagleton, in his account of the formation of the Anglo-Irish novel, contends that there is a tension between the ideological beliefs and the imaginative insights of Edgeworth and Lady Morgan. See Heathclff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Cuhtrre (London, 5995), pp. 145-225. 116