Sir, – Frank McNally offers a jaunty narrative of the fractious marriage and separation of the once celebrated, now scorned novelist and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton and Rosina Doyle Wheeler, “a noted Irish beauty” (An Irishman’s Diary, January 18th).
It was undoubtedly a mutually unhappy relationship, but it is also clear where the power lay. In a male-dominated society, Lytton was in a position to remove their children from Rosina.
Moreover, as Frank McNally mentions, he had her committed to an insane asylum, an acceptable way of silencing “troublesome” women in the nineteenth century.
Ultimately, Rosina showed great resilience in standing up to a powerful and well-connected husband. Perhaps this fortitude can be explained in part by her own upbringing.
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We are informed by Frank McNally that Rosina’s mother was one “Anna Doyle”, a writer from Tipperary. this was the formidable Anna Doyle Wheeler (circa 1783-1848), a significant feminist intellectual and radical, who was a close friend of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and Cork-born early socialist William Thompson.
In her rejection of marriage as an oppressive institution, in her critique of the structural nature of gender inequality and in her denunciation of the “monstrous, degraded condition of my sex”, Wheeler was an uncommon and unpopular voice in high society in early 19th-century Britain.
Following dinner with the two Lyttons and Anna Doyle Wheeler in January 1833, the social conservative Benjamin Disraeli described Wheeler as “very clever but awfully revolutionary”.
An affronted Disraeli grumbled that she “poured forth all her systems upon my novitiate ear and, while she advocated the rights of woman, Bulwer abused system-mongers and the sex, and Rosina played with her dog.”
In fact, Rosina did not share her mother’s political principles, but she does seem to have inherited her strength of character.
Anna Doyle Wheeler was – as the expression goes – ahead of her time and it is disappointing that she is not better remembered in Ireland today. – Yours,etc,
FINTAN LANE,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.