The English Sappho 119her legitimacy and vitality, Robinson also attempts to affiliate herself
with moral and intellectual virtue by claiming that she “received my
education under the care of Miss Hanna [sic] More.”^7 Nevertheless,
the Morning Chronicle printed a sarcastic poetic “Elegy on Mrs.
R–bins–n, the Late Celebrated Perdita” (9 August 1786). Upon her
return to England in 1788 to begin her literary career, Robinson
would be, in a sense, always writing from beyond the grave.
Robinson knew well from her own downfall that fame is transient
and capricious and blamed her ignominy on the resentment of other
women. She writes in the Memoirs, “I have almost uniformly found
my own sex my most inveterate Enemies; I have experienced little
kindness from them: though my bosom has often ached with the pang
inf licted by their Envy, slander, and malevolence” (7: 239). Moreover,
she attributes the most vicious slanders and satires to the machinations
of “female malice”: “Tales of the most infamous and glaring falsehood
were invented, and I was again assailed by pamphlets, by paragraphs,
and caricatures, and all the artillery of slander... ” (7: 265). She blames
not the men who most certainly wrote most if not all of the attacks,
but the women who considered her their rival for celebrity and favor,
and who supposedly directed the slanderous male pens. As she later
explained in a letter to her friend Jane Porter, written just weeks before
her death, “If I do not enter into the true spirit of Friendship for my
own Sex, it is because I have almost universally found that Sex unkind
and hostile towards me” (7: 318). She went to her grave convinced
that other women were instrumental in her persecution. She obviously
felt differently about her male friends, who chivalrously defended her
and whose adoration no doubt pleased her. But Robinson’s reputation
continued to be encumbered by the stigma of having been Perdita,
“the lost one”; for that, she blamed other women.
As a poet, Robinson sought more than adoration from her circle of
friends. She was “ardent in the pursuit of fame.” Robinson’s four- part
essay in the Monthly Magazine, “The Present State of the Manners,
Society, &c. &c. of the Metropolis of England,” signed with her ini-
tials and published in the final months of her life, condemns women
writers for failing to support one another in their shared neglect. She
writes, “Each is ardent in the pursuit of fame; and every new hon-
our which is bestowed on a sister votary, is deemed a partial privation
of what she considers as her exclusive birth- right.” She suggests that,
were there more solidarity, women writers might share greater fame:
“How powerful might such a phalanx become, were it to act in union
of sentiment, and sympathy of feeling; and by a participation of public
fame secure, to the end of time, the admiration of posterity” (8: 204).9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1199780230100251_05_ch03.indd 119 12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM12/28/2010 11:08:39 AM
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