To read the novels of Sydney Owenson has always been to be made to think strangely: that is, to encounter, and often to struggle with, anomalies of style, figuration, and form. Percy Shelley’s preoccupation with The Missionary, and his continuing engagement in “Fancy” with what remain, to him, images inaccessible of resolution or realization (or what he calls the capacity to “incorporate”) is at once the best-known and most favorable contemporary response to such an experience of Owenson’s novels (P.B. Shelley 1: 107).

But his coupling of preoccupation with the strangeness of fancy has close parallels in several more public and more fully explicated reading histories, such as William Gifford’s review of Woman: or, Ida of Athens, from 1809. Writing in the first number of the Quarterly Review, Gifford remarks that the effort of reading the novel, “a hundred similar conundrums, in the compass of half as many pages,” has left him “in despair; . . . turning the leaves of the volume backward and forward.” He speculates that the printer must have “fabricated the requisite number of lines, by shaking the types out of the boxes at a venture,” making the novel “a kind of overgrown amphigouri, a heterogeneous combination of events, which, pretending to no meaning, may be innocently permitted to surprise for a moment, and then dropt for ever” (Gifford 50). For John Wilson Croker, who devoted a series of essays in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal to The Wild Irish Girl in 1806–7, reading Owenson is “a task of no small difficulty” that produces a vertigo of “involvement and intricacy,” or focus and scale: “common occurrences are decorated with importance, with mysterious dignity and consequential remark—feebleness mimics strength, and trifles ape grandeur” (3). Geraldine Jewsbury, to whom Owenson was at once a friend and patron, similarly sums up the experience of reading her early works. Before writing the The Missionary: An Indian Tale in 1811, Jewsbury writes, Owenson “read up a great deal for Indian customs, history and antiquities,” but the details of her reading, “manners and customs, races and countries,” become quickly “confounded together in the rose-coloured mist of fine writing and high-flown sentiment. . . . [T]he reader feels disposed to say as Sheridan said, when the servant threw down a china plate with a great crash, without breaking, ‘You rascal! how dare you make all that noise for nothing?’” (Jewsbury 1: 424–25).

Noise for nothing; heterogeneous events without meaning: in one sense, in the emphasis on heterogeneity and clanging disunion, this reading persists in more recent commentary. Terry Eagleton emphasizes, for example, the “formally disheveled” quality of Owenson’s narratives. For Eagleton, Owenson’s irresolutions of form are best understood as a failure of closure and, in turn, as a consequence of Irish political history. He argues that her novels embody a frustrated drive to reconcile the competing ideologies of early nineteenth-century Ireland—“romantic” and “realist”; “domestic” and “political”—and in this negative sense capture the historical “truth” of Ireland’s colonized condition (Eagleton 182, 184). David Lloyd offers a similar but widened perspective on this formal heterogeneity, so that Owenson appears as just one among the group of nineteenth-century Irish novelists whose fractious narratives invariably betray the “insufficiency” of novel form to mediate the fragmentation and violence of Irish history (Lloyd 141). Implicit in these more recent readings is an assumption about narrative form that backreads what Lloyd has called the “laws of integration or harmonization” characteristic of the later nineteenth-century realist novel onto Romantic-period works (Lloyd 133). When such a drive toward formal unity is construed, as Fredric Jameson posits about narrative in general, as “an ideological—but formal and immanent—response to a historical dilemma,” then such novels as Owenson’s most often appear as symptoms of a historical conflict that refuses (for Eagleton and Lloyd, in the absence of the structures of a nation-state) to be symbolically resolved (Jameson 139).

That the more hostile among Owenson’s earliest readers locate in the novels a politics that is both consistent and readily identified—a mix of “libertinism,” “disloyalty,” and “atheism” that stands as shorthand for a specifically Irish version of English Jacobin ideology—suggests, however, that the novels’ formal strangeness is something more, or other, than a symptom of ideological ambivalence and historical fracture.

Such a strangeness could not, of course, have been understood, circa 1810, as a failure to conform to realist conventions. But the consistent and specific bewilderment expressed by contemporary readers suggests that something is taking place in Owenson’s works that is distinct not just from Victorian realist novel form but also from what Franco Moretti has called the “intrinsically contradictory” transitional form of the Romantic bildungsroman, with its tensions between “dynamism and limits, restlessness and the ‘sense of an ending,’” or its more specific instantiation in the imperial quest romance described by Sara Suleri (Moretti 6, emphasis in original; Suleri 10–11).

It is not only, and not primarily, formal irresolution that troubles Owenson’s earliest readers. Rather, these readers place a greater emphasis on their surprise and bewilderment at encountering an overwhelming yet at the same time frustratingly insubstantial plenitude: Jewsbury’s noisy mist; Croker’s vertigo of scale; Gifford’s turning of pages, at once compulsive and unrequited.

Owenson may seem a surprising candidate for a philosophical reading: her work has not been addressed by any of the major recent scholarship on the history of sensation, and, to the extent that her novels have been considered in conjunction with empiricist thought, the readings have tended to concentrate exclusively on her invocations of political sympathy.

Yet the essays she published in later life speak suggestively—more suggestively than elaborately, but in a context designed retrospectively to inform readings of her novels—about her interest in contemporary philosophy, particularly questions of sensation and of life. By her early teens, she writes, she had been broadly “influenced” by “the value of philosophy and the importance of chemistry”: she took “infinite delight” in Locke’s theories of sensation but found Kantian idealism “vague and unsatisfactory” (though it is not clear that she ever read Kant) (Morgan, “Raconteurs” 1: 32; “Richard Kirwan Esq.” 1: 60). In middle age she enjoyed discussing philosophy with her husband, though on occasion, when she forgot herself, “giving [her]self the air of talking metaphysics . . . and throwing in a word on the Doctrine of Causation” in front of male visitors, “a look” from Sir Thomas Charles Morgan could quickly send her back to conventionally feminine topics such as landscape, with which she “made ‘pure description hold the place of sense’” (Morgan, “Doctrine of Causation” 1: 191–92).

With such a statement, Morgan firmly separates her epistemological musings not only from Locke’s representational and referential conception of sensation but also from the major metaphysical schools of her own time: Kantian idealism, with its positing of an extrasensory noumenal realm that grounds all knowledge even while it remains inaccessible save to the intuitions of reason, and Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy, with its establishment of a given though incompletely perceptible world as an arrest to the skeptical implications of empiricism.

Unlike the phenomenophiles discussed by Rei Terada, who retreat to “mere phenomenality” in retreat from or revolt against the normative pressures of the given, Morgan seems, in her essays, to bracket the very idea of givens (Terada 32).

Gifford complained that Owenson was an enemy of, or perhaps merely allergic to, “revelation” (52). He may have been more accurate when he wrote, with Gifford, of Owenson’s “inveterate obliquity” of “mind, which prevents her from perceiving, or stating a fact as it really exists”; certainly there is more evidence in her writings for such a claim (Croker and Gifford 261). In The Missionary, Owenson comments that the “waking dream”-like experience that suffuses the eponymous protagonist Hilarion on his arrival in “Cashmire” is “sensation” that has “survived all power of perception” (Owenson, The Missionary 105). And, as we will see, Owenson does turn away—not glancingly, but persistently—from what Reid called “perception,” or the cognitive assemblage of sensations into approximations (imperfect figurings) of the things of the given world, the secular counterpart of “revelation,” or at least of metaphysical doctrine (Reid 290).

Truncated as they are, Morgan’s philosophical comments in her essays can serve as little more than hints. In her early novels, however, to which the essays are a supplement, Owenson dwells constantly in sensation. Here, for example, is a passage from the extended (eight-page) scene that introduces Ida Rosemeli, the heroine of Woman, a passage characteristic enough to make one of Gifford’s three epigraphic examples of “a hundred similar conundrums in half as many pages” (Gifford 50). In the scene Ida is asleep and seen for the first time from a distance by an “English traveller”:

an air of vestal innocence, that modesty which is of soul, seemed to diffuse itself over a form whose exquisite symmetry was at once betrayed and concealed by the apparent tissue of woven air which fell like a vapour around her. There was something so delicate, so ideal in her form, that the very drapery that veiled it seemed to partake of its aerial character; and her gently languid respiration alone, spoke her not a thing which fancy only had embodied. . . . 
Changing her attitude from grace to grace, as indulgence dictated, or ease impelled, the variety of her gentle motions might have presented to the statuary the most beautiful, the most difficult models for imitation; while the delicious indolence of doubtful sleep seemed still to struggle with the renovating energy of awaked intelligence. Happy state of indefinite existence! how perpetual the formless but delicious visions which live and die with you! . . . 
At that moment a door . . . slowly opened, and an elderly female . . . cautiously entered the room . . . ; then drew a drapery across the lattice work to exclude the sun: the drapery excluded, also, the dazzled gaze of the English traveller.—The beautiful vision vanished! After the scene, the forms, he had previously witnessed, could it be more than a dream! (Owenson, Woman 1: 22–23, 26, 27–28)

⁽⁸⁾

The scene of the traveller’s distantiated gaze, familiar to contemporary readers from Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, is here substantially rewritten in being deprived of substantive details: the “scarlet, “bodkin,” and “diadem” of The Wild Irish Girl’s Glorvina gives way to vapors, and the traveller Horatio’s experience of Glorvina, who seems to him “like the incarnation of some pure ethereal spirit” but whose beauty is anchored in the “symmetrical contour” of her body—a literal “figure” indeed—yields to the mobile agentless attitudes of Woman (Owenson, Wild Irish Girl 48).

In this scene Owenson achieves a strange plasticity of image by means of extended conceits and uncertain pronoun reference (in the analogy between modesty and translucent veiling, a comparison founded on the simile form of “seem[ing],” it is impossible to determine whether the “apparent tissue of woven air” is a figural or material garment, or, somehow, both), strings of adjectives whose numerousness and abstraction confirms the stated pairing of “the most beautiful” with “the most difficult,” and dangling participles that, remaining unsutured to a subject, never attribute the actions they describe (who exactly is “changing [Ida’s] attitude” as she sleeps, and whose “indulgence,” “ease,” and “imitation” are at stake?) (Owenson, Woman 1: 23, 26). By Owenson’s diction and syntax, as in the narrator’s semantic claim, Ida’s presence is “at once betrayed and concealed” (1: 23). Is Ida, as the novel’s title suggests, a “woman”? A “form” (1: 28)? A “vision” (1: 28)? It is only certain, from Owenson’s thickly worded but strangely vaporous and “vanish[ing]” description, that she is “not a thing,” at least “not a thing which fancy only had embodied,” even as the scene invites “the [whose?] fancy” to “wander . . . through imagined worlds” (1: 23).

The presence of the thing, and the referential bond between this “real figure” and the “visible figures” that represent it in the mind, is never in question in Reid’s philosophy, for it is warranted by what he calls “the Author of [his] being” (Reid 294). In Owenson’s Woman, in contrast, lexical range and plenitude and syntactical restlessness and uncertainty mean that the figures of sensation are left unresolved. They don’t fully take shape, and the glancing sensations they capture are left unpinned to the assumption of a stable referent. Thus they are best understood as a series of metonymies: shifting sensations, often minute, impermanently as well as imperfectly established as a partial reference to any fully formed or fixed “external thing.” Not for nothing did Owenson’s contemporaries describe her early novels as “extravagant,” or wandering, figuratively, outside the straight paths of representation marked by metaphor, synecdoche, and common sense philosophy.

The descriptive passages in her early novels typically remain both formless and fluctuating. If they frustrate such readers as Gifford by inciting them to fruitless motion, they engage another kind of reader, such as, avowedly, Shelley, who enjoys the invitation to wander.

Defining Romanticism as “a wide-sweeping inquiry into the phenomena of life,” Denise Gigante has argued for the prominence of epigenesist conceptions (those focused on the “power” of self-actualizing formal potential and self-organizing form) in the poetic as well as the biological thought of the period (Gigante 26, 39). For her the key figure in Romantic debates about life is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who repurposed his key phrase “multëity in Unity,” the definition of poetic beauty, to define life as “unity in multëity” (Gigante 3).

Against the dominance of Coleridge, Amanda Jo Goldstein has recently posited the Shelley of The Triumph of Life, who, Goldstein argues, pursues a “Lucretian poetics of transience” wherein the relations between and mutual impacts of living, not-quite-living, no-longer-living, and more-conventionally-understood-as-inanimate beings and things come together in an understanding of life as collective, contingent, historical and therefore perpetually in flux (Goldstein 62–63). To make this argument, for Goldstein, is also to take issue with Paul de Man’s reading of figuration (understood both as troping generally and as face-giving, or prosopoeia) as “a power radically alien to life, relation, and sense” and the dominant force in Shelley’s poem (Goldstein 66).

Here her argument takes an explicitly ethical turn: when the category “life” takes on a distinct ontological status, “life” also becomes a comparative and implicitly value-laden term (Goldstein 69). Or, as Goldstein puts it, “when science affirms specific forms of life [those less organized; those less fully formed] to be medically less alive already, it helps to render their deaths less reprehensible—a logic familiar to twenty-first-century readers from its realization in fascist thanatopolitics” (70). For her Lucretian Shelley, in contrast, faces are everywhere together. In the final few words of this essay, I would like to consider the implications of Goldstein’s rigorous and important reading of Shelley for approaching the novelist whose poetics of sensation helped make Shelley think so strangely.

Owenson’s motion-capture of the play of sensation that is tantamount to life is at least as tropical as the face-giving Triumph of Life for which it provided Shelley with a model. Yet unlike Shelley, or Lucretius, the Owenson of Woman and The Missionary rarely, if ever, makes faces. Her closest approach to prosopoeia might be the moment when the narrator asserts that the scene of the protagonist’s “delightful and delighted wanderings . . . seem[s] . . . to smile into a luxurious garden” as the “English traveller” approaches Ida’s home (Owenson, Woman 17–18). Here, though, the narrator’s figuring of the traveller’s sensation yields a motion and a resemblance rather than a face and an identity, however contingent, whether singular or composite. As ever in Owenson’s early work, sensation, while figural (here, that most mobile of tropes, the simile) is specifically not form-making.

If we compare Shelley’s Lucretian atomism with Owenson’s descriptions of sensation, we will discern Owenson’s contrasting emphasis on a perpetual motion of fleeting minutiae, atoms of sense that elude formal resolution: a rigorous (and, with respect to Shelley’s prosopoeia, proleptic) resistance to pareidolias of all kinds.

By emphasizing the unbridgeable gap between description and things, Owenson prompts her readers to consider their own composite, mobile quality and their suffusion in a world of sensation—an experience that, she reminds them in The Missionary, can also be understood as the varied texture of love. What her contemporaries called decadent (but also recognized as radical), and what subsequent readers have sometimes dismissed as an effete leisured dalliance becomes an ethics of interdependency as pleasure—lacking in determined outcomes, radically unproductive and, therefore, in Owenson’s terms, “free.”

Such an ethics stops short of what Tim Milnes, in his essay in this volume on the essayistic and pragmatic character of empiricism between Hume and J. S. Mill, identifies as the “possibility of a shared experience,” which, Milnes argues, is the implicitly ethical as well as epistemological goal of Romantic moral philosophy. Yet Owenson’s prose, like the philosophical essays of Charles Lamb and others, both avowedly subscribes to and formally enacts a conception of literary form and literary experience that is, like the sensation it cultivates and describes, exuberantly autotelic. Such an ethics of sensation emerges with inconceivable but especially insistent liveliness when it is read amid the histories of Romantic form and life.