John Wilson Croker

J. W. Croker 's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey ) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft

The prose pieces include a dialogue of the dead between the ancient beauty Helen and the modern Madame de Maintenon . Literary historian James Chandler notes that the most substantial piece in the volume is...

Critics in general, from first publication onwards, tended to identify Sydney Owenson with her heroine; the name Glorvina stuck to her thenceforward. The Critical Review (whose notice spelled this name wrong throughout) said it could...

This novel, said the Critical, deserves great praise for stepping out of the high way of modern romance. Owenson's rendering of its hard Greek names was quite as full...

Croker confessed to liking this piece, but insisted that Owenson had not yet heard the last of his dislike of The Wild Irish Girl.

One of this novel's topics is concealed identity (which results in repeated changes of name for several central characters). As the story opens, two men land at Dublin (which they find desolate, poverty-struck by the...

In the society that Morgan depicts, the Irish Catholic gentry are mostly absent, scattered in European exile. The peasantry, dirt-poor but generous-hearted, include Tim O'Leary, schoolmaster of a hedge school, scholar and expert in Irish...

De Staël is said to have had France read to her on her deathbed, with approbation. Her lover Benjamin Constant defended Morgan from attack, and Morgan's own friend Lady Charleville , who had previously...

Croker , who again reviewed for the Quarterly, was obviously one of the race of intolerant critics who, according to the Morning Chronicle, were thrown into a STATE of FURY...

Sydney Owenson replied to a series of anonymous satires by the young J. W. Croker on Dublin theatre people, with a spirited pamphlet lampoon bearing her initials.

They included public men like George Canning , John Philpot Curran , and Lord Erskine , and writers and theatre people like John Philip Kemble , George Colman the younger, dramatist and examiner of plays...