Literary histories of Ireland frequently dismiss the period immediately following the 1800 Act of Union as a cultural low point. According to this viewpoint, the story runs along the following lines: the act resulted less in union than in the absorption of the Irish body politic into a larger and less sympathetic entity. Dublin was divested of its authority as a centre of legislation, causing those with sufficient wealth and influence to abscond to England. Ireland's capital - and by extension the rest of the country - soon lapsed into provincialism and a once-lively cultural scene shrivelled. Significant literature did not begin to emerge again, and in a very different form, until over a third of century later, after Catholic Emancipation.

The Royal Irish Academy's Committee for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature recently hosted a conference to test these assumptions. Called Ireland After the Union - A Cultural Desert? the occasion included the presentation of papers on Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Jonah Barrington, Gerald Griffin and Charles Maturin, as well as an analysis of a pseudonymously-written book called The Matron of Erin and a survey of the literary magazines of the period. The core text of the conference was The Wild Irish Girl, by Sidney Owenson, better known as Lady Morgan. Work presented at the conference seemed to suggest that while post-Union Ireland did indeed suffer a period of political decay and economic decline which, from a privileged, Protestant ascendancy perspective, fulfilled anti-Unionists dire predictions, writers used the effects of this change as material. "In thus grappling with the effects of the Union, a new potent culture was emerging," argued Dr Claire Connolly of the University of Cardiff, a conference participant. "Its characteristics were a newly-introspective interest in `Irishness' and in the wider remaking of Ireland's potential."

Three writers tower over the period: Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan and Thomas Moore. Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, published in 1800 though written between 1793 and 1796, is often dubbed "the first Irish novel" and certainly its Big House setting and themes were played out over and over again in later Irish fiction. Edgeworth was easily the most celebrated of the practising novelists of her time, with publishers paying the author up to £2,000 for a single work; Jane Austen was offered a conditional £450 for Emma.

Thomas Moore is best remembered today for his Irish Melodies, a group of lyrics published between 1808 and 1834 and set to music by Sir John Stevenson and others. The songs include several of lasting fame: Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms; Oft in the Stilly Night; The Meeting of the Waters. Moore was a prolific writer, praised for his satires and biographies as well as his poetry. His life of his friend Lord Byron is among Moore's best prose works.

The third member of the triumvirate was Sydney Owenson who, much to her delight, became Lady Morgan when she married Sir Charles Morgan in 1812. As conventional in her writing as Edgeworth was innovative, Owenson's life was as colourful as Edgeworth's was dull. The Wild Irish Girl, with its remnants of the romantic Gaelic past - a dilapidated castle, a Catholic priest, a deposed king and his beautiful daughter - is a founding text in the discourse of Irish nationalism. Morgan used the novel form to introduce the findings of Irish antiquarians to a wider audience. When the book first appeared, its openly-avowed national sentiments were praised and pilloried along predictable political lines. What most strikes a reader today is its wildly florid prose. The novel's hero describes his feelings for the woman he loves in the following terms: "Glorvina turned full on me her eyes of dewy light [and] mine almost sunk beneath the melting ardour of their soul-bearing glance. Oh! Child of Nature! Child of genius and of passion: Why was I withheld from throwing myself at thy feet." Only Morgan's 1827 novel, The O'Flahertys and the O'Briens, another "national tale", has any complexity to it. However, as acknowledged by her contemporaries, the writer's literary contribution was considerable. She wove the two guiding passions of her life - the wrongs of Ireland and the importance of women - into virtually everything she wrote. She was the first successful professional woman novelist; the first to be given a state annuity for services to letters; and the first Irishwoman to enjoy social, intellectual and financial prestige entirely through a business-like exploitation of her literary talents.

Edgeworth and Morgan founded a distinct tradition for the Irish novel. So why the "cultural desert" tag? Could it be because two of its leading lights were women? It is difficult to believe that a writer such as Maria Edgeworth, for example, would have fallen into such neglect were she not female; only determined feminist scholarship has resuscitated her reputation and that of Morgan. As an Athenaeum columnist commented on the latter writer's death in 1859: "Her books were battles. She wrote in an age when to be a woman was to be without defence and to be a patriot was to be a criminal." While being an Irish patriot would, in time, become modish in literary circles, being a woman remains problematic to this day. The RIA conference focused on fiction but the novel was not the only form of literary endeavour that thrived during the period. "You had the ongoing pamphlet wars which were highly animated and theatre too was lively," Clare Connolly explained. Irish newspapers and journals also increased in number over these years, often dividing along political and religious lines, though few were of a high quality, often reprinting or lifting material from London publications.

But it is a mistake to define "Irish" culture as simply being that which emanated from Dublin, Connolly argued. "If we are told that directly after the Union, Irish culture was being produced for an English audience, while at the same time we know that many people were leaving Ireland for England, that introduces the complication of who exactly the English audience were."

"I see post-Union Ireland as a time when the notion of a literary product as `Irish' resides somewhere other than place of publication. A notion of Irishness as exportable which is very akin to our own time."

Such new perspectives will continue to challenge traditional perceptions of this period. "If Ireland was a cultural desert after the Union," commented Terence Brown, chairman of the RIA's Committee for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature, "then it is a desert that is beginning to be surrounded by critics." What these new scholars find will no doubt further populate what is becoming an increasingly occupied landscape.