Mary Darby Robinson “An alien from delight, in this dark scene!”

Mary Robinson (Robinson) was a contemporary writer to Charlotte Smith (Smith), and they both concurrently acquired fame for their outstanding literary compositions. However, with the passing of time together with the biased dynamics of historical writing, these two authors fell into oblivion. It was not until the last few decades that they became part of a group of women writers that are no longer overlooked within the Romantic literary canon and whose production

continues to contest the principles of English Romanticism (Daniel Robinson 1). Thanks to the works of literary scholars who have engaged in the study of their legacy, we have access to valuable resources that provide opportunities to critically research their writings.

Smith’s and Robinson’s lives converged in many aspects. They both met severe difficulties in their respective marriages, experienced economic hardship²⁴, suffered from harsh health conditions from an early age and made a living from the pen. Also, they shared a radical political conscience, admiration for Marie Antoinette and Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, and both commenced their literary life writing in newspapers (Cross, Illegitimate Influences 62). Besides, according to Jaqueline Labbe (Labbe), they equally conveyed their sorrows in their texts, while, skilfully, evoking sympathy for marginalised groups and contemporaneously for themselves (“Selling One’s Sorrows” 68). Likewise, their political and proto-feminist discourses and strong social critiques focused sympathetically on the French newcomers, and other alienated characters that conveyed the universal condition of estrangement of the population living in a climate of war and censorship (Markley 388).

Concerning their mutual experience with migration or exile, contrary to Smith, Robinson did not migrate voluntarily or was obliged to leave England during her life, though she spent short periods travelling to France and Germany. These journeys were the response to a necessity --as other proto-feminist writers of her time -- to occasionally escape from the dogmatism and national fanaticism of British society (Craciun, “Mary Robinson” 32). The first-hand experience with exile that we can recollect from Robinson’s memoirs and some letters penned by the author that are available today, is more connected to the final phase of her short life. In her last days, Robinson remained socially isolated in a cottage in Englefield, while she was impoverished, persecuted by her creditors and suffering from a progressive paralysis –caused by the same condition of rheumatism that affected Smith’s health (Brewer 119). It is not perhaps coincidental that Robinson’s last collection of poetry Lyrical Tales published posthumously the same year of her demise, presents several characters representing alienation not only as a recognised community being physical displaced –as Smith—but also through individuals facing cultural and social estrangement.

Even if we can easily observe several parallels between Smith’s and Robinson’s personal lives and authorship, putting them together obliged us to move our attention to the many hypotheses concerning the complicated bond they might have had. First, while they both knew

24 They both spent time in debtor’s prison. Mary Robinson wrote a poem titled Captivity in 1778, describing her experience secluded accompanying her husband to prison (Mellor, “Making an Exhibition” 291).

each other and had several literary acquaintances in common, including William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, they were not friends. Apparently, Robinson was more interested than Smith in cultivating a cordial relationship with the latter. As some letters written by Smith to her publisher evidenced, she clearly did not want it to be linked to Robinson because of the latter’s marred social reputation.²⁵

The sonnet Robinson wrote to Smith in September of 1793, under the pseudonym Oberon --- a name that was already unveiled by the author --- can shed light on the complicated relationship between the two poets. The title of the piece Robinson dedicated to Smith was Sonnet to Mrs Charlotte Smith, on Hearing that Her Son Was Wounded at the Siege of Dunkirk, and as these words suggest, the text constitutes Robinson’s response to the sudden news announcing the misfortune of Smith’s son (Cross, “Illegitimate Influences” 62). The use of the pen name Oberon has been interpreted as a strategy used by Robinson to avoid a full declaration of tribute to Smith, who refused to have publicly any connection to Perdita (Robinson)²⁶. Some scholars have paid attention to the fact that throughout the sonnet dedicated to Smith, Robinson tries to connect to the author as a mother, and not as a cohort writer (D. Robinson 27). The first stanza of the poem reads as follows,

Full many an anxious pang, and rending sigh,

Darts, with keen anguish, through a MOTHER’S breast;

Full many graceful TEAR obscures her eye,

While Watchful fondness draws her SOUL from rest.

The emphasis on Smith’s maternal identity, instead of her writing capacity, might have functioned as a remark on the type of kinship that prevails between the two women. The lack of references to them as belonging to the same literary circle, but instead, the insistence on their common maternal role implies for some scholars a refusal by Robinson to praise Smith’s writing talents (D. Robinson 27). Such a view is supported by another relevant fact, that is, Smith’s great fame for reviving the genre of the sonnet after the publication of Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 (Cross, “Romantic dialogues” 20). Simply put, Smith was so famous for her writings, particularly for her sonnets, that it was difficult to ignore her place as a central author of the period. Another aspect that further complicates the many interpretations that this poem has brought forward is that, as has been noticed by Labbe (2003), the authorial identity of Smith as a poet was intrinsically connected to her maternal role. Thus, Robinson’s stress on Smith as

25 Harriet Guest mentions an episode of Smith’s life when she requested her publisher to be careful to circulate an image of herself in the same magazine Robinson’s portrait has been publicised (207).

26 Robinson was known as Perdita–a nickname that comes from her role in Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (D. Robinson 3).

a mother, in contrast to her writing abilities, might also have had the aim of evoking her authorial persona.

The intertextual and affective connections between the authors that we can retrace from the sonnet are several and not conclusive. For instance, Cross points out that in the sonnet, Robinson, beside plainly mentioning the boy’s great courage and his mother’s pain, also pays tribute to Smith’s writing talents when she imitates her style and selects the sonnet as literary genre in the text. The sole act of creating a sonnet can be seen as a subtle declaration of admiration of Smith’s prodigious sonnet writing (Cross, “Illegitimate Influences” 62-63). Of course, the act of emulating Smith’ poetical artistry could also have had the function of associating Robinson’s literary skills to Smith’s.²⁷

A noteworthy fact that explains Smith’s reservations to be associated to Robinson, and the latter as reluctance to openly praise the other and their mutual constant preoccupation with posterity, is the way the two authors were distinctively and unequally appreciated by the conservative press. The reviews of the authors’ latest and posthumously published works, by giving a moral evaluation of the two writers, show the importance the media gave to their personal life. After Smith’s death in 1808 –Robinson passed away eight years earlier-- two reviews were released on The Annual Review and History of Literature on both Smith’s Beachy Head: With other Poems and Robison’s Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson:

Including Many Pieces Never Before Published. The review dedicated to Smith’s Beachy Head (1807), depicts a talented poet who has an exceptional capacity to transmit poetically and transparently her deepest feelings. A few lines of the review read as follow

Her stile [sic] was clear and flowing, her diction poetical, ornate, and usually pure, and unaffected. Her ‘Sonnets’ were principally built on individual feeling. They are the breathings of sorrow, disappointment, and complaint (Behrendt, Charlotte Smith 191).

Contrastingly, in the review dedicated to Robinson, she is personally attacked for the content of her memoirs, that were included in her latest published work. The reviewers pondered Robinson’s accounts in her memoirs to be falsely constructed from the viewpoint of a woman who cannot by any means lament the sufferings she perpetrated against herself. The reviewers judged Robinson’s words as “that kind of unmeaning exaggeration and decorated inanity which

27 Apart from these elements and after a detailed analysis, Cross mentions numerous factors that could have played a significant role in Robinson’s creation of the poetical piece, such as the decision to publish it in a newspaper --Robinson’s territory at the time--; also, the usage of poetry for consolation in times of sorrow, another common feature of Smith’s and Robinson’s poetry (“Illegitimate Influences” 62-63).

are the miserable resource of a cold heart, a vitiated taste, and a defective genius” (qtd. in Behrendt, “Charlotte Smith” 190). This negative review was written almost a decade after Robinson’s death. Part of the review read as follow,

Why from these very mistresses of colonels, captains, and ensigns – from that guilty, but much enduring class of women, who rashly bartering away the good opinion of the world, the respect of friends, and the care of legal protectors, receive nothing in exchange but some vague and ineffectual claims on the gratitude, tenderness, or pity, of the most base, selfish, and profligate portion of mankind! Such a one was poor Mrs.

Robinson, and as an impressive lesson of the effects of such a course of conduct upon the mind, temper, and fortune, her prolix and querulous effusions, her ‘miserable strain’, may be recommended to the attention of thoughtless and inexperienced youth (Behrendt, “Charlotte Smith” 190).

The above review did not in fact provide a close reading of Robinson’s poetical work; instead, it concentrates on her reputation, violently attacking her for being a free woman, unsubmitted to social control. Behrendt considers the main factors that drove these opposite reviews, on the one hand, Smith’s intact reputation as a suffering wife and mother, and, on the other, Robinson’s visible alliance with the “revolutionary politics”, along with her proto-feminism, and her “eccentric” (out of the norm) sexual life and well-known partners (Behrendt, “Charlotte Smith” 192). This review proves that Robinson’s constant preoccupation with “literary obscurity” was not unfounded after all.

The comparative analysis of the two romantic writers opens a broad space to inquire about the literary and personal associations between Smith and Robinson, but this task will be left for the chapters dedicated to the close reading of their poetical texts. In this section, we are going back to the historical analysis of the author’s era, approaching it from her personal accounts. As in regard to Smith, this section will focus on the author’s views on the topics of alienation, nationalism and gender through biographical material found in critical works together with a few letters which the author composed in the last years of her life.²⁸. Using these sources, it is possible to create links between the historical context, personal accounts of the writer, and her way of handling migration and exile poetic language.

To start, Robinson (1758-1800) was a famous actress before becoming a well-known English writer. Her career as an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre began in 1776, at the age of seventeen, when she debuted in the leading role of Juliet in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Later, she played in theatres a variety of characters – sometimes even more than one role a night – which contributed to her status as a celebrity and a cultural icon. As Robinson herself tells us in the

28 Mary Robinson’s memoirs and an essay titled Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc, Etc, of the Metropolis of England (Present State of the Manners), written in 1800.

Memoirs, she was already married in the early beginnings of her acting career –she wedded at the age of fourteen-- to a man she calls a “mere nominal guardianship of a neglectful and profligate husband” (Robinson, Memoirs VI). In these episodes of her life, she underlines her role as a good mother, daughter and provider of her family (Peterson 43).

Robinson attracted the attention of the public, especially of the gossip press, for her extramarital relationship with the Prince of Wales (George IV). This relationship started around 1779 after the Prince of Wales attended one of her performances as Perdita–a nickname that has followed her into the present day-- in Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (D. Robinson 3). However, the affair with the Prince of Wales was seen by many as a transgression of the hegemonic social norms of the period, and spoiled her reputation in English patriarchal society. In this phase of her life, when the scandalous relationship with the Prince of Wales began and the attention of the press and public focused on it, Robinson’s actions turned into a real-life performance. In response to this pressure, she spent most of her later literary life addressing the issue of her damaged reputation --an issue that remained central in her oeuvre (D. Robinson 6).

Some scholars reject the idea that Robinson was just a victim of a gossip press, which depicted her as a sexual figure, and prefer to acknowledge that she made use of these images by exploiting them to boost her celebrity status (Brock 107-8). Indeed, Robinson became very early in her life and career a famous artist and a fashion icon as well as a target of the press.

She might have been one of the most portrayed women of her time --well-known artists such as George Romney, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Gainsborough made portraits of the poet (Mellor, “Making an Exhibition” 278).

As Robinson narrates in the very first lines of her memoirs,

The author of these Memoirs, Mary Robinson, was one of the most prominent and eminently beautiful women of her day. […] Her beauty, indeed, was such as to attract, amongst others, the attentions of Lords Lyttelton and Northington, Fighting Fitzgerald, Captain Ayscough, and finally the Prince of Wales; whilst her talents and conversation secured her the friendship and interest of David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles James Fox, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Murphy, the dramatist, and various other men of distinguished talent (Robinson, “Preface to Memoirs” vii ).

Robinson left the stage and England in 1784, and came back four years later with the intention of starting a literary career that lasted until the end of her life in 1800 (D. Robinson 2). In her literary years (1784-1800), Robinson produced works in various genres, such as novels, plays, political pamphlets and even an autobiography. Her great fame as an actress did not prevent

her from achieving fame as a writer²⁹. She also contributed extensively with her poetry to the Morning Post alongside with other famous writers of the period, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Her talent in composing poetry gained her the epithet of the “English Sappho”, and it was indeed poetry what gave her the highest recognition (D.

Robinson 17). In the last few of years of her life, she wrote a novel The Natural Daughter (1799), a collection of poems Lyrical Tales (1800); her Memoirs (1801) and the feminist pamphlets A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799) and Present State of the Manners (1800), which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Robinson started writing her Memoirs in 1798, two years before her decease. She knew when she was writing the autobiographical text that it probably “will be read when the hand that writes them moulders in the grave, when that God who judges all hearts will know how innocent I was of the smallest conjugal infidelity” (Robinson, Memoirs 83). The Memoirs were completed, edited and published by her daughter in 1801. Half of the Memoirs was added by her daughter in the final version of the manuscript, including aspects of the artist’s private life and an emphasis on her ability as an improvisatrice (Peterson 38).

Robinson’s Memoirs present us one of the few examples of women’s autobiographical narratives in the eighteenth century. The absence of woman’s personal accounts can be the result of social gender norms that used to discourage women to show their intimacy publicly.

Also, this genre, in its traditional form as it was established by male tradition, did not necessarily fit women’s experiences (Peterson 36). They constituted a literary means by which the author assumed a perspective similar to that of a historian (Ty 25). For Robinson, specifically, this genre also served as a means to re-write her own story, which was at the time the subject of adverse manipulations.

Robinson’s accounts of her life in the memoirs are instructive to their readership on how the author wanted to be remembered. They offer an example of the act of an author exposing her own subjectivity at the final phase of her life and the power of textually constructing an identity (Runge 566). In this life history re-construction, Robinson builds through the recollection of crucial moments of her existence, the authorial persona she wishes to share with her public.

Here again, we see a conjuncture between her public and private life, and how she suggests to her readership to have access to the intimacies she has tried to counterbalance, this time, with the intention of re-writing, by her own terms, her story (Runge 565). The first pages of the

29 An edition of her poems in 1791 obtained the support of more that 600 subscribers and the first edition of her very first novel Vancenza (1792) became sold out in a day (Arnold 733).

autobiographical text give us an image of the author’s early years. Robinson tells us, that “on the 27th of November, 1758, I first opened my eyes to this world of duplicity and sorrow”

(Robinson, Memoirs 3). These lines led the way for the rest of the story of a woman writer’s life and anticipated the myriad of difficulties she had to endure all through her existence.

In a fragment of Memoirs, she mentions an event that changed the course of her life. She describes that in 1784 she was “attacked by a malady”, “[b]y an imprudent exposure to the night air in travelling” (qtd. in Ty 30). With the passing of time, this illness degenerated into a condition that limited her capacity of mobility, and ultimately caused the complete paralysis of the lower part of her body. In Robinson’s Memoirs, she informs her readership of the physical fragility and the fatigue which she experienced during the last phase of her lifetime.

This inability to be in control of herself, the consequential feeling of dispossession and isolation is accentuated in her personal chronicles under a Gothic framework where she portrays her plight and “confinement” (Arnold 735). The gothic framework of Robinson’s narration is appropriate to depict the situation of confinement and social estrangement she was experiencing when writing the Memoirs (Arnold 745). As Mellor notes, Robinson’s use of such a Gothic style conveyed an image of herself as a “persecuted heroine” fated to suffer from the beginning to the last days of her life (“Making an exhibition” 294)

Alas! How little did I then know either the fatigue or the hazard of mental occupations!

How little did I foresee that the day would come, when my health would be impaired, my thought perpetually employed, in so destructive a pursuit! At the moment that I write this page I feel in every fibre of my brain the fatal conviction that it is a destroying labour. (Memoirs 197)

Interestingly, Robinson did not use analogous expressions towards the writing career in other

Interestingly, Robinson did not use analogous expressions towards the writing career in other