The English Sappho 113claim to the title of “English Sappho.” While many of her poems first
appeared in print pseudonymously, Sappho and Phaon was published
as a volume with her actual authorship clearly identified. For her
series of “legitimate sonnets,” Robinson presents herself unequivo-
cally as the poet Mary Robinson.
From 1788, the start of her poetic career, until her death at the
end of 1800, Robinson’s poetic ambitions were masculine in a way
that those of most of her female peers were not. These ambitions gov-
erned her participation in the Della Crusca network, and through-
out the 1790s, Robinson clearly maintains her appetite for poetic
play—complicated formal experimentation, exaggerated figurative
language, winking intertextuality, playful sexuality, and hyperbolic
ambition—among networks of male writers and masculine- inflected
texts. Making only negligible obeisance to any poetic predecessors
and contemporaries who were women, Robinson positioned herself
in her verse as an erotic compeer and a poetic competitor to male
poets. Her formal and professional interaction with Merry estab-
lished a pattern that Robinson would follow for the rest of her career.
These formal assignations connected herself, her avatars, and her
poetry to other male writers—and their avatars—with whom she felt
poetic affinity as well as friendship. After Merry, these would include
playwright James Boaden (“Arno”), satirist John Wolcot (“Peter
Pindar”), author Samuel Jackson Pratt (“Courtney Melmoth”), and
poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Francini,” “Laberius”). There are no
female poetic correspondents, except for a Miss Vaughan who wrote
to Laura as “Cesario.” Even when Robinson writes to Charlotte
Smith, her chief literary rival, she emphasizes Smith as a mother, not
as a poet (see chapter one). With the exception of Anna Matilda, the
other female addressees, notably not correspondents, in Robinson’s
poetic canon are her own daughter, other mothers, and deceased girls.
The only, and significant, exception to this is Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire, whom throughout her career Robinson always regards
as a patron, celebrity, and sister, a woman, wife, and mother—but
never as a fellow writer. And, as we have seen in chapter one, many of
these tributes to other women are mediated through the masculine
persona of Oberon.
R o b i n s o n ’s h e t e r o e r o t i c p o e t i c s i s a l w a y s a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e “ w r e a t h
of fame,” a laurel she is not especially willing to share with her poeti-
cally minded sisters. Using the pseudonym “Anne Frances Randall,”
Robinson does pay tribute to her fellow literary countrywomen in her
Letter to the Women of England but not without some ambivalence—
and not without highlighting her own pre- eminence among them. In9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1139780230100251_05_ch03.indd 113 12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM
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