Introduction: The Wreath

of Fame

Where there is so much to admire, we may be excused the unpleas-

ing task of busy censure; we have more satisfaction in listening to the

oracular inspiration which enables us to predict, that the picture of

the fair writer’s mind pourtrayed in these poems, will long outlive

the portrait of her person, though drawn by the pencil of a Reynolds.

She may truly say,

Exegi monumentum ære perennius.^1

—Review of Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson,

Analytical Review (July 1791)

The first decade of the twenty- first century has witnessed the con-

summation of Mary Robinson’s most cherished desire—to be remem-

bered. After nearly 200 years of relative oblivion, Robinson has

become one of the stars of an expanded Romantic literary canon.

Among the previously neglected writers recovered by feminist and

historicist scholars, Robinson stands with Charlotte Smith, Anna

Letitia Barbauld, and Felicia Hemans as the poets who have received

the most attention.^2 Unique among them, however, Robinson is the

subject of three biographies published roughly within one year of one

another; and she appears as the character- narrator of a pot- boiling

romance novel that describes her as “a woman who changed history

by doing as she pleased—for money, for fame, for pleasure, and above

all, for love.”^3 In a way, this peculiar aspect of Robinson’s current sta-

tus as an icon is a replay of the kind of attention she herself endured.

During her life, Robinson indeed had been the subject of sensational

(fictional) biographies and the victim of scandalous fictional por-

trayals of her love life. Like Lord Byron, Robinson is a writer whose

fascinating life, personal charisma, and phenomenal celebrity make

her an important cultural figure. Indeed, Robinson’s literary com-

positions are only one facet of a remarkable career: she was also an

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

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