Mary Robinson

English writer and actor

• Born: November 27, 1758?
• Birthplace: Bristol, England
• Died: December 26, 1800
• Place of death: Englefield Green, England

Robinson was an actor, poet, writer, and editor who won respect and acclaim among her colleagues, including Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a literary reputation that surpassed that of both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her written work was gothic, satirical, feminist, sentimental, realist, and politically radical.

Early Life

Mary Robinson was born to Nicholas Darby, a successful merchant, and Hester Vanacott. From a very early age she exhibited melancholia, reading funereal inscriptions and elegies by the age of seven. In Bristol, Robinson was educated at the school of Hannah More, who introduced her to the theater in 1764 when More took the entire school to a performance of William Shakespeare’s King Lear at Bristol’s Theatre Royal. It is likely that Robinson acted in More’s play for girls, The Search After Happiness (pr. 1762, pb. 1763).

Robinson’s young life was secure until her father’s business interests in Newfoundland and Labrador claimed his attention. In 1768, after her father took a mistress abroad, her parents separated and Robinson’s world collapsed. Nicholas Darby ordered his wife to live in the home of a local clergyman and his children to go to boarding schools. It was the eighteenth century, and Hester Darby had no legal right to dispute her husband’s orders.

Robinson attended the Chelsea school of Meribah Lorrington, receiving a classical education; Robinson attributed her love of literature and learning to Lorrington. Robinson’s mother established her own school, where Robinson taught English and religion. Nicholas Darby, however, demanded the school be closed after only one year. Attending Oxford House school in Marylebone, Robinson was taught dancing by the ballet teacher at Covent Garden and met David Garrick, playwright and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre. She was fourteen when she was received at the Garrick home, and Garrick himself prepared her to play Cordelia to his Lear.

Life’s Work

Through the theater Mary met Thomas Robinson, who would become her husband. Thomas nursed her through illness, winning the loyalty of her mother. They were married in 1773, when she was fifteen years old. Thomas required that the marriage remain secret until he attained his majority. Mary’s mother discovered that Thomas was not, as he had claimed, the soon-to-be-financially-secure heir of a Welsh uncle but was, on the contrary, already of age, in debt, and an illegitimate son.

In the early years of their marriage, though in debt, the Robinsons lived well and were introduced into high levels of London society. However, Thomas began gambling and carousing; Mary was pregnant and home alone. Deeper debt and Thomas’s increased dissipation ensued, and when Mary was near her delivery date, debtors foreclosed on their home and the couple traveled to Wales, where their daughter, Maria Elizabeth, was born on October 18, 1774.

Thomas feared he would be arrested for debt, so the couple and their infant daughter fled to Mary’s grandmother’s home in Monmouth. However, Thomas eventually was arrested. He settled his debt but was apprehended again on May 3, 1775, and put in debtors’ prison at the Fleet, where Mary and Maria Elizabeth stayed with him until his release on August 3, 1776.

One of their friends brought an old school chum of Thomas to visit—playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who, with Garrick, trained Mary to play Juliet. Her first stage performance was on December 10, 1776, at Drury Lane, initiating her successful stage career and providing income for the couple. She played in plays by Shakespeare, in light comedies, and most famously in so-called breeches roles, playing male characters and wearing men’s clothing.

During December, 1779, the prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, saw her and became enamored, and it was said that during a performance of The Winter’s Tale she played Perdita not to the Florizel on stage but to the prince in his box. The affair became the subject of gossip columns and cartoons about “Perdita” Robinson, as she became known, and “Florizel,” the prince. He soon offered her a bond for œ20,000, payable upon his majority, if she would quit the stage to become his mistress, an offer she accepted but bitterly regretted all her life. Her last performance was on May 31, 1780. She was acclaimed as one of the most beautiful women in London, “the greatest and most perfect beauty,” according to the prince. She embarked upon a life in the grand style, only to be forsaken the next year for another woman. Robinson pressed her claims, eventually receiving œ5,000 and an annuity from the prince.

The now notorious Robinson traveled to Paris, where she received a warm reception and was often in the company of Marie-Antoinette, queen of France. When she returned to England—where she was already famous for her fashion sense and innovations—she brought French fashion trends with her, including la chemise de la reine, styled after Marie-Antoinette’s fashionable clothing. Robinson would engage in many affairs with prominent French and English noblemen and military officers.

This beautiful, talented, and much feted former actor fell seriously ill and became paralyzed in her legs when only in her mid-twenties. Hearing that her lover, Colonel Banastre Tarleton, was to escape debtors’ prison by fleeing to the Continent, she paid his debts and took off in the middle of the night to meet him before he embarked, but she was too late. She caught a chill during the night ride, which settled into rheumatic fever and thereafter chronic rheumatism; she suffered a miscarriage and, at some point, possibly a stroke. For a while she maintained her aura of public panache but her financial situation continually worsened.

Robinson, however, had always been adept at reinventing herself, and this time was no different for the former Mary Darby, who had become the young bride, then the illustrious Perdita, and then the notorious Mrs. Robinson. She now became Mary Robinson, an eminent member of the British literary world.

Robinson’s early poetry shows the stylistic influence of the Della Cruscans, a group of late eighteenth century English writers of pretentious and rhetorically ornate verse. However, she soon found her own voice: satiric, incisive, realistic. In addition to writing Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1791), Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson: Volume the Second (1794), a collection of sonnets titled Sappho and Phaon (1796), and incisive social satires such as Modern Manners (1793), she regularly contributed poetry to the Oracle and the Morning Post, often publishing her work under numerous pseudonyms. She was poetry coeditor of the Morning Post with poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and she succeeded poet Robert Southey as poetry editor of the Morning Post in 1799.

Robinson received mixed reviews for her various novels, which include the following: Vacenza: Or, The Dangers of Credulity (1792), a Gothic roman à clef; The Widow: Or, A Picture of Modern Times (1794), a social satire in epistolary form; Angelina (1796), a sentimental tale with sociopolitical undercurrents and feminist satire; Hubert de Sevrac: A Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796), a Gothic morality tale of the French Revolution; Walsingham: Or, The Pupil of Nature (1797), a politically radical and satirical roman à clef with a gender-bending protagonist; The False Friend (1799), a feminist romance; and The Natural Daughter (1799), an implicitly autobiographical novel in which the female protagonist, deserted by her husband, earns her living as a writer and actor. Her feminist essay, first published under the pseudonym Anne Frances Randall, advocated many feminist positions, including university education for women, reflecting her association with feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft.

Poets Coleridge and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and Mary Robinson published Lyrical Tales in 1800. Her collection enhanced the standing of the experimental Lyrical Ballads prior to its 1802 edition. She was acclaimed by her literary colleagues although denounced by conservative critics.

Robinson had financial problems throughout her life and battled illness since that night ride to meet Tarleton at Dover. Despite poor health, in her last years she maintained her position with the Morning Post and continued to write and translate. She and daughter Maria Elizabeth lived at Englefield Cottage near Windsor Great Park and had a wide circle of literary friends, including Coleridge and Wollstonecraft. She died of “dropsy of the chest”—possibly congestive heart failure—on December 26, 1800, and is buried at Old Windsor.

Significance

Mary Robinson was known by the title given her in the Monthly Review: Our English Sappho. Coleridge praised her as a “woman of genius,” noting her ear for the music of poetry and for innovations in prosody. Her poems are included in the Romantic canon for their metrical brilliance and penetrating realism. Her feminist treatise is read alongside Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790). Her Memoirs (1801) take their place in the tradition of Romantic introspection. Sappho and Phaon, Petrarchan in form and classical in subject, has come to be recognized, along with the sonnets of poet Charlotte Smith, as reestablishing the sonnet form in English letters.

Many of Robinson’s works represent the spirit of her age, looking forward to a time of sociopolitical and personal regeneration. Hers was a larger-than-life personality. She prevailed over a disastrous marriage, social ambiguity, penury, and paralysis, leaving a substantial contribution to eighteenth century Romantic literature.

Bibliography

Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson. New York: Random House, 2004. An authoritative biography with an extensive bibliography.

Cross, Ashley J. “From ’Lyrical Ballads’ to ’Lyrical Tales’: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt.” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001): 571-605. Reviews Robinson’s poetry and its relation to the work of her contemporaries.

Curran, Stuart. “Mary Robinson’s ’Lyrical Tales’ in Context.” In Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. An in-depth reevaluation of Robinson’s work.

Pascoe, Judith. “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace.” In Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995. Places Robinson in the context of newspaper publishing and other new commercial venues for writers.