The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Introduction 5

performing Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is immediately

familiar to us. We have peculiar access, moreover, to Robinson’s sex

life—real and imagined. Her husband’s adultery and her own liai-

sons with several powerful men of her day, including not only the

Prince but also Whig statesman Charles James Fox and her long- time

companion Colonel Banastre Tarleton, she herself confirmed; these

activities and relationships featured prominently in newspaper gossip

columns and satirical prints—in some cases depicting Robinson as

exposing her breasts or, in one particularly vitriolic print, as being

vaginally impaled. In the case of the Prince and Fox, among other

presumed lovers, pornographers narrated Robinson’s sexual encoun-

ters with them.^6 What other Romantic- period writer appears to us

in such sexually explicit representations? And without any real evi-

dence, scholars accept as fact the supposition that the debilitating

illness which left her paralyzed and immobile for the final fifteen

years of her life was the result of a miscarriage. While certainly pos-

sible, this supposition reveals a tendency to imagine the more titil-

lating scenario when Robinson’s body is at issue. Most significant

to Robinson’s cultural status is the fact that her physical beauty was

captured by the leading portraitists of the period—John Hoppner,

George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Joshua Reynolds, who

painted her twice—and all of this before she began her literary career

in earnest. But even t hen her presence manifests itself in innumerable

newspaper puffs, hyperbolic verse tributes by her friends, beautiful

printings of her books, and not least of all in the rhythms, sounds,

and shapes of her poetry.^7

My study of Robinson’s poetry picks up in the aftermath of her

previous celebrity, which continues to resonate throughout her career;

but I want to foreground Robinson as a working poet in the instant

of her poems’ publicity, most often as they first appeared in newspa-

pers attached to various pseudonyms. As Pascoe observes, Robinson

employed her pseudonyms “to proliferate herself” (Romantic 174).

My i ntere st i n t hat po et r y i s to exa m i ne f a me a s a po et ic t rope, a rec u r-

ring motif even, through the course of her career as a poet. Although

this book is about fame, it is not really a cultural study of celebrity;

that work is well underway.^8 Focusing on her poetry, I do not see

Robinson as a shameless self- promoter capitalizing on her fame and

on her infamy so much as I see her as a former celebrity attempting to

do something more meaningful and lasting with her talents. In what

follows, I mean to draw a distinction between her cultural celebrity

and her quest for literary fame—not because I believe she, as a public

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

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