began her writing career. Career She was one of the most vivid and hotly discussed literary figures of her generation. She began her career with a precocious volume of poems. She collected Irish tunes, for which she composed the words, thus setting a fashion adopted with signal success by Thomas Moore. Her novel St. Clair (1804), about ill-judged marriage, ill-starred love and impassioned nature worship, in which the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (specifically his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was apparent, at once attracted attention. Another novel, The Novice of St. Dominick (1806), was also praised for its qualities of imagination and description. But the book which made her reputation and brought her name into warm controversy was The Wild Irish Girl (1806), in which she appeared as the ardent champion of her native country, a politician rather than a novelist, extolling the beauty of Irish scenery, the richness of the natural wealth of Ireland, and the noble traditions of its early history. Given the moral and intellectual strengths of her heroine, the novel's embodiment of Irish nationhood, Glorvina, it has also been described as "proto feminist". In Catholic and Liberal circles she often referred as Gloria or Glorvina.. Patriotic Sketches and Metrical Fragments followed in 1807. She published The Missionary: An Indian Tale in 1811, revising it shortly before her death as Luxima, the Prophetess. Percy Bysshe Shelley admired The Missionary intensely and Owenson's heroine is said to have influenced some of his own orientalist productions. Miss Owenson entered the household of John Hamilton, 1st Marquess of Abercorn, and in 1812 — persuaded by Lady Abercorn, the former Lady Anne Jane Gore — she married the philosopher and surgeon to the household, Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, but books continued to flow from her facile pen. In 1814 she produced her best novel, O'Donnell. She was at her best in her descriptions of the poorer classes, of whom she had a thorough knowledge. Her elaborate study (1817) of France under the Bourbon Restoration was attacked with outrageous fury by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, the author being accused of Jacobinism, falsehood, licentiousness, and impiety. Her heroines were violently removed from what Croker considered their proper sphere as "a useful friend, a faithful wife, a tender mother, and a respectable and happy mistress of a family". Owenson took her revenge indirectly in the