The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Notes

Introduction: The Wreath of Fame

1. The Latin is from Horace, Odes 3.30: “I have built a lasting
   monument.”


2. One might also add Helen Maria Williams, Mary Tighe, and L. E. L.
   (Letitia Elizabeth Landon).


3. I quote from the back cover of Amanda Elyot’s All for Love.


4. To commemorate the bicentennial of Robinson’s death, Jacqueline M.
   Labbe put together a conference that became a special issue of the
   journal Women’s Writing devoted to Robinson. See Labbe’s introduc-
   tion to the issue (“Mary Robinson’s Bicentennial”).


5. John Wolcot, who wrote as “Peter Pindar,” later would become one of
   Robinson’s closest friends.


6. For more on the satirical and pornographic representations of
   Robinson as Perdita, see Pascoe (130–62), Mellor, and Brock
   (77–99); the biographies, too, address these and reprint many of the
   images. I discuss some of these in chapter three. Tim Fulford’s “The
   Electrifying Mary Robinson” is a particularly original and illuminat-
   ing study of Robinson as a figure of consumable sexuality. See Laura
   L. Runge’s and Elizabeth Fay’s studies of Robinson’s publicity in light
   of contemporary views of adultery. A particularly important reading
   of Robinson’s preliterary celebrity in direct relation to her poetry
   (and that of Wordsworth) is Betsy Bolton’s “Romancing the Stone.”
   Linda Peterson studies the difficulties of female authorship in relation
   to Robinson’s attempt to “author(ize) herself in and through auto-
   biography” (36). Certainly, studies of Robinson cannot escape her
   celebrity, which, as Ashley Cross demonstrates, continues to inform
   the reception of her later poetry and her response to younger poets
   such as Wordsworth and Coleridge (“From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical
   Tales”). Eleanor Ty considers Robinson’s problematic past in relation
   to her later novels; see Empowering the Feminine (24–84). And Diego
   Saglia looks at Robinson’s career—particularly as self- represented in
   the Memoirs—in relation to discourses on luxury.


7. For more on Robinson’s life and career, including the scandal-
   ous details, see the three most recent biographies, but especially

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

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