Sarah Isdell

Life
?1780-?; thought to be related to Oliver Goldsmith; wrote the novels The Vale of Louisiana (1805) and The Irish Recluse, 3 vols. (1809); also a comedy, The Poor Gentleman (1811), which was staged successfully in Dublin. DIW PI

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Works
Novels
  • The Vale of Louisiana, An American Tale, 2 vols. (Dublin: Brett Smith [3 Mary St.] 1805), I: 224pp; II: 243pp.
  • The Recluse, or Breakfast at the Rotunda, 3 vols. (London: John Booth [Duke-Street, Portland-Place] 1809), I: iv, 260pp., ill.; II: 226pp., ill.; III: 249pp., ill.

 

Plays
  • The Poor Gentleman (Crow St. Th., Dublin, 4 March 1811).
  • The Cavern or The Outlaws, com. op. (Th. Royal, Dublin 22 April 1825) [music by Stevenson, q.v.].

Query: The Poor Gentlewoman.

—The details on fiction given here are cited in Women’s Print History Project - online; 25.08.2023]

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Criticism
  • Colleen Taylor, ’Feminist Fancy in the National Tale: Edgeworth, Owenson, and Sarah Isdell’s The Irish Recluse (1809)’, in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 37:2 (Fall 2018), pp.295-323 [see abstract].
  • Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (Pennsylvania UP 2015), p.170ff.
  • Joseph Rezek, ‘Transatlantic Influences and Futures’, in Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830, ed. Claire Connolly (Cambridge 2020), Chap. 10 [see detail].

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Commentary
Colleen Taylor, ’Feminist Fancy in the National Tale: Edgeworth, Owenson, and Sarah Isdell’s The Irish Recluse (1809)’, in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 37:2 (Fall 2018), pp.295-323: ‘[...] Through its radical imagination, or fancy, The Irish Recluse idealizes feminocentric societies in order to reconceive Irish nationalism, exposing the patriarchal social order as antithetical to good governance in Ireland. Unlike other political narratives at the time, Isdell’s novel argues that the problem with Ireland is its paternal, imperial structures and that women’s influence would foster the best relationship between Ireland and Great Britain amidst debates on if and how they should be unified. Isdell’s fictive, microcosmic Ireland envisions the perfect union through female social support rather than heterosexual marriage, resulting in a definition of Irish national identity that thrives on a matriarchal structure—a concept reiterated in Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s later novels. Criticism might better classify the national tale as a feminist dialectic, which emerged much earlier in history than is typically imagined.’ (Abstract at TSWL website - online; accessed 25.08.2023.)

Joseph Rezek, ‘Transatlantic Influences and Futures’, in Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830, ed. Claire Connolly (Cambridge 2020), Chap. 10 - This chapter considers the transatlantic influences that shaped Irish literary culture in the romantic period. In particular, it focuses on two understudied phenomena. First, the chapter provides an account of texts published in Ireland that concern African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, written by pro-slavery sympathisers, white abolitionists, and writers of African descent like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. Second, it zeroes in on a forgotten Irish novel, Sarah Isdell’s The Vale of Louisiana, published in Dublin in 1805, which dramatises the transatlantic, trans-Caribbean travels of an English family, addresses slavery directly, and borrows heavily from a canonical early American novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). The chapter concludes on the other side of the ‘steep Atlantic’, as Sydney Owenson called it, and briefly addresses the publication and reception of Irish writers in the early United States, especially Thomas Moore and Maria Edgeworth, where they found an unpredictable and productive future. (Information at Cambridge Univ Press online; accessed 25.08.2023.)

Note: Rezek’s previous work, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (Pennsylvania UP 2015) - incls. remarks on Isdell and especially her indebtedness to the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s horror-story Wieland, or The Transformation - An American Tale (1798), which deals with the horrific murder of his family by a religious fanatic, apparently under the influence of mysterious voices which might be associated with the ventriloquist gifts of another character, Carwin. The story is told by his sister Clara who is in love with her sister-in-law and former friend Catharine's husband, Henry Pleyel.

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References
Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee: The Kerryman 1946), Sarah Isdell fl.1820; two dram. pieces, The Poor Gentleman (Crow St. 4 March 1811) and and The Poor Gentlewoman, both comedies and neither printed - though O’Donoghue [PI] thinks The Poor Gentleman was so; also The Cavern or The Outlaws, com. op. (Th. Royal, Dublin 22 April 1825), with music by Stevenson.

See Dublin University Magazine (Oct. 1855, p.443); Allardyce Nicoll, History of Early Nineteenth-century Drama,, 1800-1850 (1930) [PI].

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