The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Introduction 7

Robinson had a confidence in her poetry that, given her disappear-

ance for two centuries, may seem absurd. But she knew that her liter-

ary afterlife could not be as shrewdly manipulated as some celebrities

manage their more ephemeral publicity. For instance, Robinson’s

proto- feminist tract, A Letter to the Women of England (1799), con-

cludes with a “List of British Female Literary Characters Living in

the Eighteenth Century,” including herself, Barbauld, Elizabeth

Inchbald, Hannah More, Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary

Wollstonecraft, among others. This list is curiously impartial because

it is not necessarily a list of the best women writers but, rather, merely

a list of women writers. Robinson adds to it,

There are various degrees of merit in the compositions of the female writ-

ers mentioned in the preceding list. Of their several claims to the wreath

of Fame, the Public and the critics are left to decide. Most of them have

been highly distinguished at the tribunal of literature. (8: 163)

Discussing such matters as literary merit has proven to be difficult

when it comes to the recovery of noncanonical writers because,

frankly, much of their writing does not seem to be as good as that of

the more familiar writers whom we are better equipped to read and to

explicate. As Susan J. Wolfson remarks, in relation to the question of

w het her or not Hem a n s’ p o et r y i s a ny go o d , or i f it i s a s go o d a s t h at of

Byron or Keats, this kind of question is “culturally over- determined”

(Borderlines 35). Wolfson’s work reminds us that we have had more

than two centuries to shape the ways in which readers experience and

appreciate the so- called Big Six Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats). For writers who have been

absent from our own reading lists during that time, it is not so much

a matter of recovering them as it is of recovering ways of understand-

ing them. We should remember that, at the end of Robinson’s career,

Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s were not off to particularly auspicious

starts; and critics would ridicule Wordsworth’s poetry for several

years to come. For Robinson, her own investment in poetic merit, her

claim “to the wreath of Fame,” was everything. And, desperate for

money and for health, at the end of a career of remarkable vicissitudes

and of a life that spanned only a little more than four decades, all

Robinson could do was make that claim as vehemently, as ferociously

even, as she could.^9

My personal starting point whenever I return to Robinson’s

poetry is her poetic correspondence with Coleridge and the fact that

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

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