Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Robinson
-
Standard Name: Robinson, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Darby
Married Name: Mrs Mary Robinson
Nickname: Perdita
Pseudonym: A Friend to Humanity
Pseudonym: Miss Randall
Pseudonym: Anne Frances Randall
Pseudonym: Laura
Pseudonym: Laura-Maria
Pseudonym: Julia
Pseudonym: Daphne
Pseudonym: Oberon
Pseudonym: Echo
Pseudonym: Louisa
Pseudonym: Tabitha Bramble
Indexed Name: Mrs Thomas Robinson
MR
, scandalous woman and Romantic poet, was also a forceful and emotional, radical writer in many other genres: novels, scholarship, memoirs, drama, periodical essays, and translation. During the last two years of her life her level of productivity was almost frenetic, and the quality of her writing was adversely affected.
Miss Aikin's Poems sold five hundred copies in just over four months, and the second edition sold a similar number in a similar period. In September a third edition was announced.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
111
The Monthly Review...
Literary responses
Anne Damer
AD
's sculpture brought some echoes of the earlier attacks on her. A print displayed in London in July 1789, The Damerian Apollo, showed her in the unfeminine act of taking artistic liberties with...
Literary responses
Selina Davenport
Julie A. Shaffer
quotes at length from the cross-dressing passages in this book in Appendix C of her edition of Mary Robinson
's Walsingham.
Robinson, Mary. Walsingham, or, The Pupil of Nature. Editor Shaffer, Julie A., Broadview Press, 2003.
526-30
Literary responses
Susannah Dobson
Not long after her death, SD
was mentioned by Mary Robinson
as one of the enlightened British women who had enriched their country with valuable translations. Another who agreed about her attainments was Richard Polwhele
Literary responses
Sarah Harriet Burney
Charles Burney
, too, slighted his youngest daughter's work in comparison with the elder's.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
lxii
Jane Austen
later noted that Clarentine seemed good on the first reading, not so good on the second, and unnatural...
Literary responses
Ann Radcliffe
The Italian won for AR
the accolade of praise from Thomas James Matthias
, scholar, editor, and librarian at Buckingham Palace, who invoked the shade of Ariosto
to honour her in the same place...
politics
Charlotte Dacre
It appears from some of her poems (praise of Pitt
, dispraise of Fox
), as well as from her eldest son's name, that CD
was a Tory like her husband, or at least a...
Reception
Helen Craik
Apparently the only journal to notice Adelaide de Narbonne was the Anti-Jacobin in January 1800: it wished that Craik had not left her own political stance inexplicit.
Craciun, Adriana, and Kari E. Lokke, editors. “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800”. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 193-32.
AI
's Epistle to Pope was anthologized in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, in the 1770s. Mary Robinson
, praising it in 1799, thought it was written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
.
JW
uses heroic couplets for formal poems like To the Island of Sicily (on the retreat of the king and queen of the Two Sicilies before the French Army of Italy, commanded by Napoleon
...
The novel itself has elements of a spoof on the gothic, a didactic courtship plot, a social satire of the dialogue kind associated with Elizabeth Hamilton
and Thomas Love Peacock
, a sentimental melodrama, a...
Textual Features
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
Even Sappho's suicide is rewritten not as an act of tragedy, precipitated by her abandonment by her lover Phaon (as Mary Robinson
had depicted it in Sappho and Phaon, 1796) but as a calm...
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
The first-named is George I
's rejected queen
(accused of adultery and imprisoned for life before her husband came to the English throne, while her alleged lover
was assassinated). The protagonist of the second novel...
