I explained here my task in editing Mary Robinson’s Selected Poems: See the hub-post here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . It came out of my own use of Robinson’s sonnets for my ‘English Strain’ project, which I talk about here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), and here, you'll also find lots of images relating to her: Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I provided a brief life for my versions, ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, but here I offer a (still brief, but I hope full and accurate) life of my subject for use in the Selected. It’s still not quite finished, because I need to read the third biography of her, to triangulate my information, as it were. THREE biogs came along at once, like buses, during 2004-5. And here I am, looking back at her life, having used it for my own poems. Her life is remarkable, and I recommend the biographies (either of the two I’ve listed below, and I’ve no reason to believe the third inferior). In many ways, you couldn’t make it up, as they say. By which people mean: if you had made it up, no one would believe you, a life that weaves Garrick, Sheridan, the Prince Regent, Marie Antoinette, a war hero, William Godwin and Coleridge together in one fabric. In many ways it is like the life of Mina Loy in the Twentieth Century. (Both had to deal with the advantages and disadvantages of great beauty, of course.) Why there are no bio pics of either is a surprise (though there are novels with Mary Robinson in, a Jean Plaidy at least from the 1960s). Below I give you the bare bones.
Mary Robinson was born Mary
Darby in Bristol in 1758. Her father was a commercial explorer operating in
Canada, away from home during most of Mary’s childhood, and living with a mistress.
(Later he would become a distinguished naval officer, partly in the British,
but notably in the Russian, navy). In Bristol, Mary received a progressive
education for a girl, at one of the schools run by poet Hannah More (or her
sisters), and later, in London, where the family moved to be closer to Darby on
his infrequent returns to Britain. Although the stage was regarded as an
inappropriate profession for a woman, theatre (and writing) had been part of
Mary’s education, and her acting skill was taken up by the leading dramaturge
of the era, David Garrick.
At 15½ she was married to Tom Robinson, who claimed to be
a rich heir, but was, in fact, the illegitimate child of a well-off Welsh
landowner, who had no intention of lending or bequeathing money. The couple,
installed in extensive premises, with all the trappings of extravagance, such
as a phaeton, lived well beyond their means, entertaining, and being
entertained by, the fashionable ton. In 1774 their daughter, Maria
Elizabeth, was born. Although Mary had renounced the stage on marriage, her
husband’s financial irregularities, which led to the couple being imprisoned
briefly as debtors, forced Mary to become a professional actor, this time
chiefly under the tutelage of that other leading theatre practitioner and
playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Mary had a brief but dazzlingly successful career at the
Drury Lane Theatre beginning in 1776, performing in such roles as Juliet and
Cordelia in adaptations of Shakespeare, as well in comedies of the era,
including Sheridan’s. She even played the role of the pregnant Fanny in George
Colman’s The Clandestine Marriage, while carrying her second daughter
(who died soon after birth). Celebrity culture as we understand it today was
probably born during this period and actors were as famous for their off-stage
exploits as they were on-stage. Mary came under this curious spotlight, as her
every item of clothing was described in detail in the press, thus setting a
fashion for whatever attire ‘Mrs Robinson’ was courting that week. Every lover,
real or supposed, was reported in scandalous detail. Mary was often described
as the most beautiful woman in the land and reported reactions confirm this
(though this is not always reflected in her portraits, even Romney’s and
Gainsborough’s); but she was also one of the most scandalous women. The
contemporary taste for satirical engravings testify to the circulating rumours,
as well as to the frequently depicted cuckold status of Tom Robinson, whose sexual
infidelities had increasingly distanced Mary. Pursued by a variety of dandies,
philanderers, rakes and libertines, it was her relationship with Prince George
(later Regent and King George IV) that was most prominently commented upon and
satirized. This affair was conducted by public flirtations at the theatre, and
by secret assignations at Kew and Windsor. Although George (who was some years
younger than Mary) was besotted, he was persuaded (by the King) to forego his
liaison with her, but he was also persuaded, if not actually blackmailed, by
Mary (with his revealingly sentimental correspondence) to, firstly, pay her a
large lump sum and, secondly, to provide a considerable annuity for her. On her
side, Mary wore a miniature of the young handsome George around her neck for
the rest of her life. (The annuity was paid, but irregularly.) The press
referred to the couple as Perdita and Florizel, after the principals of
Garrick’s re-working of The Winter’s Tale in which Mary had performed
before the Prince in 1779. She finally left the stage the following year, but
the ‘Perdita’ persona was to stick. (And long after her death, arguably to our
own day, given the titles of biographies.)
The Prince of Wales was at this time politically aligned
with the Whigs, and Mary, along with her aristocratic friend, Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, campaigned for Charles James Fox in 1784. This marks the
beginning of Mary’s political affiliations, as well as the occasion for a short
affair with Fox himself. However, her great lover was neither the royal nor the
radical, but a military hero, Banastre Tarleton, just returned from the
American War of Independence, and who was as much the talk of the town (and the
press) as Mary herself. The couple possibly met at the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
where both sat for portraits, which were soon after exhibited together
(knowingly). Tarleton, the scion of a Liverpool sugar and slave trading family,
and a war criminal by modern standards, proved relatively faithful to Mary
(until a final break in 1797). He still has a plaque marking his birth in Water
St., and there is a Tarleton Road and a place named Banastre too! As Liverpool
MP, he was a supporter of Fox (even his Tarleton ‘crop’ was the apparent
hairstyle of the Jacobins). An inveterate gambler, Tarleton’s debts were
frequently cleared by his Liverpool family, and he was implored to relinquish
his relationship with Mary in exchange for the largest of these bailouts. In
confusion, and to evade creditors, he fled to the continent in July 1783.
A distraught Mary followed him in a carriage, assuming
Dover to be his point of embarkation. Pregnant again, Mary suffered a
catastrophic collapse on the way to Kent, and a miscarriage. Exposure to the
elements contributed to an attack of a rheumatoid condition that resulted in
partial but permanent paralysis of her legs. Reunited with Tarleton, she
recuperated in France, the press reporting, not always accurately, on her
condition. One newspaper announced her death. She had previously visited France
under quite different circumstances, having seen (and possibly met) Marie
Antoinette, and immediately on her return, had introduced looser French fashion
into female London society, the Perdita Chemise, for one. Those days were over.
Mary
was largely away from Britain until early 1788. As she recovered, now in the
continuing care of her mother, Hester, and her daughter Maria Elizabeth, Mary
assisted Tarleton in the writing of his memoirs (as she had assisted him with
his political speeches). Since childhood, Mary had written poetry and prose,
and while in debtors’ prison she had published a volume of poems, Poems by
Mrs Robinson (1775) to be followed in 1777 by Captivity, a Poem;
she wrote several dramatic works, one of which she performed in. The Lucky Escape, a Comic Opera, Drury Lane, 1778, was never
officially published.
However,
her main literary career begins on her return from France. While she still
figured in the celebrity press (largely as a pathetic invalid), she was
increasingly commented upon in the literary press, her forthcoming
publications or works-in-progress either ‘puffed’ or reviled, depending on the
paper’s politics. Predictably, she immersed herself in the current literary
fashion. This was, in some ways unfortunate, because the Della Cruscan school
of poetry was then in the ascendent, noted for its lyricism of high sensibility
peppered with metaphors. The common disapprobative adjective of its style was
‘flowery’. (Some recent critics have re-cast it as a knowing community writing
ludic and burlesque entertainments.) The insistence upon ordinary speech in the
poetics of William Wordsworth, in the ‘Preface’ to The Lyrical Ballads,
a decade later was, in part, a reaction against this school. Writing in its
journal, The World, its chief poet, Robert Merry, conducted a public
(though page-based) flirtation with several women poets, and Mary joined in the
caper. This began her practice of writing under pseudonyms (for different
styles). At various times, not unlike an actress playing roles, she appeared as
Anne Frances Randall, Bridget, Horace Juvenal, Humanitas, Julia, Laura, Laura
Maria, Lesbia, Oberon, Portia, Sappho, as well as Tabitha Bramble (for lighter
works). Horace Juvenal, for example, as the over-egged pseudonym suggests,
produced the satire Modern Manners in 1793. Mary’s facility and speed, as well as eye for detail and ear for
metrical inventiveness, turned her into a competent staff writer, producing
copy for various journals, the Oracle and the Morning Post in
particular, poems at first, but later journalistic prose and comment pieces. A
good deal of this work was scattered and not collected, although she was quick
to publish volumes of poetry under her own name, first pamphlets such as Ainsi
va le Monde in 1790, which was a favourable reaction to the French
Revolution, and was well received. (It contrasts with her 1791 pamphlet Impartial
Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France and her poem Monody
to the Memory of Marie Antoinette Queen of France of 1793, which reflect
her growing ambivalence to the violence of the Revolution.) She had great hopes
for her full-length collection, Poems by Mrs Robinson of 1791, which was
published by subscription in a lavish edition (and many of her former
associates were subscribers). The publisher went out of business and Mary
derived no income from the exertion, even from a popular digest edition. Mary
increasingly doubted the probity of publishers.
Mary
did not leave the theatre world entirely behind, both as audience and
dramatist, although a new generation of directors and actors, John Philip
Kemble and Sarah Siddons, for example, were keen to distance themselves from
the theatre scandal of earlier years, with which the name of ‘Perdita’ was
indelibly linked. Her satire Nobody, about women gamesters, was
mounted at Drury Lane in 1794, but was a reputational and box-office disaster.
The verse play The Sicilian Lover: A Tragedy in Five Acts was published
in 1796, after Mary suspected her plotlines were being plaigiarised, while the
theatre dithered over whether to stage it, before turning it down.
The
English Sappho, as Mary was sometimes called, published Sappho and Phaon in
1796, an account, borrowed from Pope’s versions of Ovid, of Sappho’s
heterosexual and suicidal obsession with the rakish Phaon. Cast into
‘legitimate’ sonnets, and based on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, it mixed
ancient Greek narrative with the form and content of the earliest sonnets. In
the event Mary produced the first English sonnet sequence since the
Renaissance, a literary milestone in itself. Whether or not Sappho and Phaon
are avatars for Mary and Tarleton (and whether or not that matters), Mary
produced a poetic tour de force of form and feeling. (It was through these
poems that I first encountered Robinson and produced ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’;
see links at the head of this post.)
Mary
turned her hand to writing novels in the last prolific decade of her life, and
produced seven (and left one unfinished). Her novels, as was then common,
contained her poems, and reviews often noted these as highlights of the
volumes. Her first, Vancenza; or the Dangers of Credulity (1792), was a
great success. Selling in vast quantities, it passed through a number of quick
new editions. Distantly autobiographical, it was a fashionable Gothic novel,
but with a political tinge. The Widow, or a Picture of Modern Times, an
epistolary novel, followed two years later, with its attacks on the
follies of the fashionable world, but it was not a commercial success (too many
copies had been printed). Angelina (1796) initially sold well, but
stalled. Its radicalism, concerning rank and the neglect of innate talent, with
its modern-sounding description of marriage as ‘legalised prostitution’, was
praised in a review by feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Set during the upheavals
of the French Revolution, Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance, of the Eighteenth
Century (1796) carries a Godwinian ethic. In 1797, Walsingham; or, the
Pupil of Nature appeared, whose plot revolves around the Wollstonecraftian
theme of women’s property rights; this novel is probably the one most admired
today. [Currently on order: possible report to follow!] The False Friend, a
Domestic Story (1799) goes one stage further and makes the heroine an open
advocate of Wollstonecraft herself. The villain was read (by knowing reviewers)
as a portrait of Tarleton; although the parallels are not absolute, Tarleton
was indeed a false friend by the end of his long relationship with Mary. (He
suddenly married in 1798, and lived until 1833, now a Tory, stoutly defending
slavery on the eve of its abolition). The Natural Daughter (1799) which
explores the dilemma of being a single mother, is perhaps her most
autobiographical novel. This summary suggests a sequence of intellectual
novels, but they are driven by strong and clearly defined characters. Several
were translated into French and German. (Mary also translated works into
English from German.) Oddly, Mary did not find writing easy. She reports a
number of times on the sheer exhaustion of literary composition, and her output
in all her chosen genres is testimony to her resilience and tenacity, in the
face of her disabilities.
Mary had always been a social creature but found
herself, after the death of mother Hester in 1793, and after the final break
with Tarleton, alone with her loyal daughter. (Maria Elizabeth also published a
novel and possibly continued Mary’s unfinished Memoirs (1801)). Mary
attempted to replace the glittering fashionable London world with a smaller
circle of writers and thinkers, as her own thinking became more radical (and
complex) in reaction to a general acceptance of Rousseau’s philosophy, and
excitement (and horror) at events in Revolutionary France, but also in relation
to homegrown politics, far to the left of her Foxite Whigism. Growing
repression at home under Pitt’s government nurtured her radicalism. She
cultivated a circle of women writers, such as Elizabeth Inchbold, Mary Hays and
Jane Porter (and may have met Charlotte Smith, her nearest literary analogue).
She knew both the rationalistic radical and novelist William Godwin, with whom
she had a relationship, involving both intimacy and animosity, and with
Godwin’s wife, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose views on women’s
property rights and female education made a profound impression on Mary (and
are reflected not only in her final novels but in her non-fiction, notably her
1799 polemic ‘A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of
Subordination’). Older writer friends, like Merry and the satirist Peter Pindar
(John Wolcot), remained faithful, but she formed one crucial younger attachment
at the end of her life. When she replaced Robert Southey as ‘poetry editor’ of The
Morning Post – though she was more of a regular contributor and
correspondent – she came to work, exchange poems, and discuss poetry with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was staff writer on politics. She read The
Lyrical Ballads, whose first (anonymous) edition Coleridge and Wordsworth
had published in 1798, but which had yet to make an impression, let alone
revolutionise English poetry. Mary’s own favourite among her books, Lyrical
Tales (1800), is profoundly influenced by it (as her work was influential
upon the work of the two collaborators). She also wrote poems to Coleridge, one
of which alludes to his ‘Kubla Khan’ which was not published until many years
later.
In
the last months of her life, Mary moved to Maria Elizabeth’s cottage near
Windsor. But this proved to be far from a rural seclusion. She enjoyed frequent
visits from members of her literary circle, but was constantly writing and
editing, even while she was failing in health. She continued producing
commercial magazine verse for various journals; she proudly listed over 70
poems written in her last year. She remained, and died, in debt, and, indeed,
was almost imprisoned again. Her prose pieces published in the Morning Post,
this time under the title ‘The Sylphid’, which adopt the viewpoint of an
invisible observer, comment on contemporary manners, fashion, and the neglect
of talent. She arranged a three volume Poetical
Works, which was seen through the press in 1806 by her daughter. A single
volume edition appeared in 1824.
Mary
died the day after Christmas Day 1800 of heart failure. She was buried in
Windsor, with Godwin and Peter Pindar as sole mourners. The grave is still
there.
2022-2023
Select Bibliography (other books will be collected into this happy list)
Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The
Life of Mary Robinson. London: Harper Perennial, 2005. (That’s the first
biography I read.)
Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel
Robinson. eds. A Century of Sonnets. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gristwood, Sarah. Perdita:
Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic. London: Bantam Press, 2005. (This is the
second biography I’ve read, more recently.)
Robinson, Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs.
Mary Robinson, Volume 1. London:
Richard Phillips, 1806; Forgotten Books facsimile reprint; London, 2018.
Robinson,
Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, Volume 2. London:
Richard Phillips, 1806; Scholar Select facsimile reprint; np: nd.
Robinson,
Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, Volume 3. London:
Richard Phillips, 1806; facsimile reprint; Miami: nd (possibly 2008)
Robinson, Mary. Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson: Including The Pieces Last Published, The Three Volumes Complete in One. London: Jones and Company, 1824; Forgotten Books facsimile reprint: London, 2015. (My copy of this is shit, with many blank pages and odd ones with only a few words on it, or only the punctuation, like a conceptual piece, but it is useful to see how the three volumes were sardine-canned into this one volume. By 1824, it is not clear who was still reading Robinson. The Romantics were taking central stage and women writers (say, Mary Tighe who influenced Keats, as well as Mary) were relegated to second-rate-hood. It awaited the pioneering (mostly women) critics of the 1980s onwards to recover these figures (I tried to accommodate as many women sonneteers as I could in the ‘14 Standards’ part of British Standards: see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post)). But Mary had to still put up with the ‘Perdita’ notoriety. You see Coleridge and Jane Porter edging away from contagion with the iniquity of Regency days, and Porter denying even having known her. Without being too pompous, it is worth remembering that even Jesus suffered denial from a disciple.)
*
Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest
blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
