The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Notes 249

3 The English Sappho and the

Legitimate Sonnet

1. Thanks to Kristen Girten for sharing this quote with me.


2. See Peter Tomory, “The Fortunes of Sappho: 1770–1850” (121).
   Tomory provides an overview of portrayals of Sappho that usefully
   contextualizes Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon.


3. Donne’s homoerotic “Sappho to Philaenis” was forgotten during the
   eighteenth century. Few new editions of Donne appeared in the eigh-
   teenth century, none in London after 1719.


4. For more on Verri’s novel, see DeJean (169–73) and Tomory, who also
   studies the accompanying illustrations by Henry Tresham. The image
   on the cover of this book is from one of Tresham’s etchings.


5. George Woodcock’s monograph on Behn is called The English Sappho
   from William Oldys’s remark that Behn may “justly be called the
   English Sappho” (81).


6. The most sexually explicit representation in print of Robinson is
   the 1784 Memoirs of Perdita. In addition to countless newspaper
   columns and satirical prints, including most notably Gillray’s The
   Thunderer (1782), which depicts Robinson being vaginally impaled,
   Robinson as Perdita also figures in Satire on the Present Times
   (1780), A Poetical Epistle from Florizel to Perdita (1781), Letters
   from Perdita to a Certain Israelite (1781), The Celestial Beds (1781),
   The Vis- à- Vis of Berkeley Square (1783), and The Amours of Carlo
   Khan (1789).


7. Robinson’s letter appears in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser
   and in the London Chronicle for 5 August 1786 and in the Gazetteer
   and New Daily Advertiser for 7 August 1786.


8. For more on the role of women poets in the eighteenth- century son-
   net revival, see my “Reviving the Sonnet.” My work on the sonnet
   builds on the foundation laid by Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and
   British Romanticism (29–55). Since my essay first appeared, Paula R.
   Backscheider (316–75), Edoardo Zuccato, and Stephen C. Behrendt
   (British Women 115–51) have significantly contributed to our under-
   standing of the sonnet during this period, and particularly of the uses
   women poets make of the form. Surveying women poets’ experiments
   with form, Backscheider rightly centers her chapter on the sonnet
   around Charlotte Smith, whom she reads in light of the eighteenth-
   century tradition and not so much as a pre- Romantic. Behrendt, in
   contrast, positions Smith at the head of a group of Romantic- period
   women sonneteers. For specific examples of what men and women
   poets did with the Romantic- period sonnet, see A Century of Sonnets,
   an anthology edited by Paula Feldman and myself. For a look forward
   from this point, see Joseph Phelan’s study The Nineteenth- Century
   Sonnet.

9780230100251_08_not.indd 2499780230100251_08_not.indd 249 12/28/2010 12:31:43 PM12/28/2010 12:31:43 PM

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