Radagunda Roberts

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In the twenty years from 1763, RR published four significant translations from French (all but one of them fiction). She contributed tales in both prose and poetry to The Lady's Magazine, and issued a volume of similar material and a verse tragedy. Her most unusual work was a volume of sermons, titled thus because a male friend had offered to preach what she wrote.
  • BirthName: Radagunda Roberts
    Her very unusual Christian name comes from St Radegund of Poitiers, a sixth-century Thuringian princess who has a chapel dedicated to her in Gloucester Cathedral. A historian observes that Radegund's life invites a feminist reading. From childhood a pawn in male politics, she was subjected to forced marriage to a suspected murderer; after fifteen years she escaped him to enter a convent, which she then made famous and powerful by acquiring a relic: part of the True Cross. She achieved her own empowerment largely by letter-writing. Her most famous work, the verse De excidio Thuringiae, strikingly describes the sufferings of women in times of violence.
    Johnsson, Peter H. “Your Radegund: Locating an empowered female voice in the verse epistle De excidio Thuringiae of St. Radegund”. Womens History, Vol.
    2
    , No. 8, 1 June 2017– 2025, pp. 18-23.
    19-20

  • Pseudonym: R—
  • Indexed: Rose Roberts
    Marijn S. Kaplan wrongly calls her Rose.

Milestones

About 1730

RR was born.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1763

RR 's earliest identified publication was a translation, begun as a French exercise, of Jean-François Marmontel 's highflown tales of maternal and marital love, which appeared at Gloucester as Select Moral Tales, By a Lady.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.

By July 1770

RR 's Sermons, she said, owed their publication to the offer of a clergyman friend a couple of years before this to preach any sermon she might write; he apparently never made good on the offer.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Roberts, Radagunda. Sermons. J. Dodsley, 1770.
iii-iv

By mid April 1774

RR 's translation from Françoise de Graffigny 's novel The Peruvian Letters . . . With An Additional Original Volume altered its non-conventional non-marriage ending.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Kaplan, Marijn S. et al. “Introduction”. Translations and Continuations: Riccoboni and Brooke, Graffigny and Roberts, translated by. Frances Brooke and Radagunda Roberts, Pickering and Chatto, 2015, p. i - xxix.
xxiv

By October 1783

RR issued a volume of verse tales set in the middle ages: Albert, Edward and Laura, and The Hermit of Priestland: Three Legendary Tales, whose leading topics are love and jealousy.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

14 January 1788

RR died in Southwark, South London, where she was buried a week later with her parents (her second choice of resting place).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
DiPlacidi, Jenny. “Searching for ’R’: A Collaborative Identification”. The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre, 19 Feb. 2016.

Biography

Birth

About 1730

RR was born.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.