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.
Mary Robinson
, writing to Samuel Jackson Pratt
about visiting authoresses, said she expected soon to see Mrs Parsons—that is EP
—at her daughter's house at Englefield Common.
Robinson, Mary. Letter to Samuel Jackson Pratt, 31 August 1800.
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...
Textual Production
Jane Porter
In 1800 appeared a pamphlet essay which may be by JP
or to her and her sister
: A Defence of the Profession of an Actor.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts: A Catalogue of Books By, For, and About Women of the British Isles, 1696-1892. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Thomas McLean
Friends, Associates
Jane Porter
JP
was also a friend of Mary Robinson
—actress, poet, and novelist—but this friendship was threatened by Robinson's position outside respectable society. When Robinson published some lines about JP
in a newspaper, Mary Champion de Crespigny
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs Ross
MR
's title is a complex literary allusion. The tragic heroine of Nicholas Rowe
's The Fair Penitent, 1703, tells her unwanted fiancé that their hearts were never paired above . . . joined...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Sappho
has inspired many original English poems, including John Lyly
's Sapho and Phao [sic], 1584; Alexander Pope
's Sapho to Phaon, 1712, and Eloisa to Abelard, 1717; and Mary Robinson
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
She begins with Wales (whose countryside she praises but whose peasants she fairly sweepingly dismisses).
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
1: 24-5
Although her title-page does not name it, she returned to Wales on a later journey, and devotes a...
Intertextuality and Influence
G. B. Stern
GBS
describes one of her own short stories in a manner that reflects oddly on the oblivion which enfolded earlier women writers during her career. The story concerns a beautiful, elegant young woman who feels...
Friends, Associates
Leah Sumbel
Mary Wells (later LS
) drew her female friends from both the theatre and the demi-monde: they included Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
and Mary Robinson
, as well as the highly respectable Elizabeth Inchbald
.
Family and Intimate relationships
Leah Sumbel
Most important among her various lovers was the minor writer Edward Topham
, with whom her relationship approached a common-law marriage. (He had been briefly the lover of Mary Robinson
.) LS
says that Topham's...
Textual Production
Leah Sumbel
It is often said (for instance by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) that Topham's main aim in this venture was to boost her career. The World was known for featuring personal attacks on...
Textual Production
Anna Jane Vardill
For her first few years of appearing there, AJV
was almost the only woman in the longish list of poetry contributors to the European Magazine (although over the magazine's lifetime the eleven women who published...
