The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

4 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

was essentially a euphemism for “whore,” persists in the titles of all

three of the recent biographies of Robinson: Paula Byrne’s Perdita:

The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson; Hester

Davenport’s The Prince’s Mistress Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson;

and Sarah Gristwood’s Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic.

Despite her penchant for sobriquets, Robinson never referred to her-

self by this name.

Nonetheless, the figure of Perdita is integral to Robinson’s celeb-

rity. Much of the research on Robinson’s life and career necessarily

has focused on the titillating and sensational aspects of Robinson

as a cultural figure at whom even Marie Antoinette marveled. Her

celebrity makes her intriguing and accessible to us today in ways

that, say, Barbauld or Hannah More are not. Several recent studies

complement Mellor’s examination of Robinson’s sexualized celebrity

by examining the extent to which Robinson’s contemporary fame is

analogous to celebrity today. In these, Robinson appears as an expert

manipulator of all available media and effectually as her own publicist.

Claire Brock, for instance, considers Robinson a “shrewd” manipu-

lator of her image who was able to capitalize on her publicity even

when it was scandalous; in other words, her literary career, according

to Brock, enabled Robinson to manage her own public relations.

Brock likely would object to my bifurcation of Robinson’s publicity

into pre- literary celebrity and her professional authorship, arguing

that the two are inseparable. In contrast, Tom Mole, while reading

Robinson’s fame as “a distributed, multimedia phenomenon,” finds

Robinson’s avid self- promotion in conflict with her desire to escape

the more ignominious aspects of celebrity (200). Thoroughly estab-

lishing Robinson’s command of “the art of the comeback,” Michael

Gamer and Terry F. Robinson show how Robinson staged her own

cultural revivals from actress to fashionable celebrity and from pop-

culture icon to her dramatic literary debut as part of the pop- culture

phenomenon of Della Cruscan poetry. Certainly, Robinson’s theat-

rical career informs much of her public maneuvering and position-

ing of herself in popular culture of the time. As quite possibly the

first modern multimedia celebrity, Robinson’s physical presence is

more palpable than that of any writer before Byron. Her success as

an actress, for instance, derived largely from her having a body that

looked good in pants when she performed breeches roles such as

Viola in Twelfth Night or Fidelia in The Plain Dealer. Because of our

own familiarity with sex symbols and celebrities of our time, the idea

of the young Prince of Wales becoming infatuated with Robinson

9780230100251_02_int.indd 49780230100251_02_int.indd 4 12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM12/28/2010 11:08:07 AM

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

Cop

yright material fr

om www

.palgra

veconnect.com - licensed to Univer

sitetsbib

lioteket i

Tr

omso - P

algra

veConnect - 2011-04-