The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 115

with the work of other women novelists of the decade, particularly

Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Hays, whom she clearly

imitates. Her novels, moreover, clearly were written in haste—as she

admitted—and were motivated by commercial concerns (7: 290).

Robinson may have shared Smith’s genuine distaste for novels, even

though Smith too wrote novels for money: Smith once stated, “I love

Novels ‘no more than a Grocer does figs’ ” (Collected Letters 81).^1

In other words, they suit her only insofar as they sell. In the preface

to the third edition of her first novel, Vance nz a, Robinson declares,

“I disclaim the title of a Writer of Novels” (2: 482). Although she

also penned several novels, in producing her poetry Robinson has

her sights set further off in the distance, on the future and poetic

immortality. So, she repeatedly claims the title of poet. Her view

of poetry and poetic aspiration is essentially masculine. Robinson’s

poetry avoids intertextual associations with other women poets,

distinguished instead by a predominant heteroerotic poetics that is

always associated with fame. The word fame appears more than 200

times throughout Robinson’s poetry, compared with fewer than ten

i nsta nces i n Sm it h’s, a long w it h dozens of ot her references to w reat hs,

garlands, and laurels. Robinson’s poetry reveals a poet not content to

be a woman poet.

She knew well that for centuries, particularly after Raphael’s

Parnassus (1512), any woman with literary inclinations was con-

descendingly dubbed “Sappho” and that such a designation was

as ephemeral as the papyrus on which the original Sappho wrote.^2

Nevertheless, “Sappho” was an avatar that Robinson could appropri-

ate and use, risky as it most certainly was. And she did have to com-

pete for it. Even as late as 1797, the year after Robinson’s Sappho and

Phaon appeared, the Morning Post, with which Robinson was affili-

ated, described, without irony, Anna Seward as “the SAPHO of the

Age” (1 September 1797). This surely would have stung Robinson,

especially considering Seward’s immaculate reputation as the (unmar-

ried) “Swan of Lichfield.” Given her own public history, Robinson

found herself saddled with and yet jealous of another potentially

problematic epithet. Although Plato supposedly dubbed the original

Sappho “the Tenth Muse,” the original woman from the isle of Lesbos

remains a mystery, her actual identity obfuscated by competing myths

of her sexuality. These narratives are familiar enough to us today,

especially since her supposed homosexuality is the source of the term

lesbian. Sappho’s erotic relationships with other women were known

in the eighteenth century but usually were attributed to her excessive

sensibility or, less charitably, to her nymphomania. For instance, in

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10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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