The Wild Irish Girl The Wild Irish Girl and her Harp
RTÉ Culture Podcast
Lyric FM feature: The Wild Irish girl and her Harp Sunday 15 November 2020, 6 – 7pm.
This portrait celebrates the extraordinary Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, a nineteenth-century celebrity cult figure and self-made woman. She penned the influential novel – The Wild Irish Girl and styled herself on the heroine, Glorvina, a harp-playing Gaelic princess; she also initiated a fashion for her own brand of pseudo-Irish dress. Her recovery of the Irish harp for the drawing room generated keen awareness in other novels of the period and helped to shape the modern instrument. Music includes specially recorded world-premiere recordings of Owenson’s songs, the Hibernian Melodies, which exerted a largely unacknowledged influence on Thomas Moore. Contributors include Owenson scholars, Claire Connolly and Julie Donovan, mezzo-soprano Laura Murphy, and the harpist Nancy Hurrell.
Presented and produced by Una Hunt with sound supervision by Ben Rawlins.
A Celtic Media Award nominee, the programme is available to listen to after broadcast on the RTE Lyric Feature Archive –
https://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/the-lyric-feature/
I hope you enjoy - and, please do leave your comments!