2 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonactress, sex symbol, courtesan, fashionable spectacle, and the subject
of titillating gossip. Like celebrities today, she was famous for being
famous—or for being notorious. Robinson was a cultural icon long
before she began her literary career as a professional writer, although
some studies tend to give the impression that it was all happening at
once. I, however, see a clear distinction between her cultural celebrity
and her years of literary fame. The period of Robinson’s preliterary
celebrity runs from her stage debut as Shakespeare’s Juliet at Drury
Lane Theatre in 1776 to her escape from England, and especially its
gossip columns and creditors in 1784. After a period of largely undis-
turbed obscurity, she returned to England in 1788 and began a liter-
ary career that lasted until her death at the end of 1800. Robinson,
as a writer, sought fame rather than celebrity. She had had enough of
the latter.
Scholarly work on the recovery of Robinson as an important
Romantic- period writer in her own right began with the publica-
tion of Stuart Curran’s groundbreaking essay “Romantic Poetry:
The I Altered” from Anne K. Mellor’s collection Romanticism
and Feminism (1988). In the 1990s, scholars—chief among them
Judith Pascoe—followed Curran’s lead by pioneering critical
approaches to the study of her poetry. The first extended study of
Robinson as a Romantic- period figure, Pascoe’s book Romantic
Theatricality presents a holistic view of Robinson’s career as a cul-
tural celebrity whose literary compositions are only one facet of the
theatrical modes of spectacle through which Robinson, along with
other Romantic- period figures, performed her publicity. Today,
Robinson’s works are available in new scholarly editions. In 2000,
Broadview Press published Pascoe’s edition of Robinson’s Selected
Poems, the first collection of Robinson’s poetry since an 1824
reprint of her Poetical Works; in 2003, Broadview followed that up
with Julie Shaffer’s edition of Robinson’s novel Walsingham and
Sharon Setzer’s edition of her feminist tract A Letter to the Women
of England, along with her final novel The Natural Daughter. In
the summer of 2010, Pickering and Chatto completed the publica-
tion of the eight- volume Works of Mary Robinson under the general
editorship of William Brewer, providing authoritative editions not
only of Robinson’s poetry but also of her eight published novels,
an unfinished novel, a proto- feminist tract, three plays, several
essays, and an unfinished but revealing autobiography. As part of
the Works, my own edition of her poetry includes more than 400
poems, exclusive of the more than forty- five poems that appeared
in her novels and other prose works.9780230100251_02_int.indd 29780230100251_02_int.indd 2 12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM
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