The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Notes 245

introductions to their respective books. Three important collections

of essays on Romantic- period women writers appeared in the sec-

ond half of the 1990s and also provide an overview: see Behrendt

and Linkin, Romanticism and Women Poets; Feldman and Kelley,

Romantic Women Writers; and Wilson and Haefner, Re- Visioning

Romanticism.

1 Bell’s Laureates I: Robinson’s Avatars

and the Della Crusca Network

1. My thinking of a network as including nonhuman actors such as
   poems is generally informed by Bruno Latour’s Actor- Network-
   Theory, explained in his Reassembling the Social.


2. Robinson does use a conventional pseudonym for her verse satire
   Modern Manners, which I will discuss in chapter two.


3. This poem is reprinted in the fourth volume of the 1801 Memoirs
   with Boaden identified as the author.


4. McGann provides a reading of Greville’s poem particularly in rela-
   tion to More’s S ens ib ilit y : An Epis tl e to t he Hon. Mrs. B oscawen (1782)
   (Poetics 50–4). Williams’s “To Sensibility,” from Poems (1786) also
   responds to Greville’s poem.


5. As she wrote in a letter, Smith considered Robinson to be one of
   several notorious “mistresses, whom I have no passion for being con-
   founded with” (Letters 252).


6. These variants appear in my textual notes to the poem (2: 434).


7. For more on The Wild Wreath see Debbie Lee’s article.


8. See Memoirs (7: 281–3).


9. I quote specifically the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (14 July
   1786), but Robinson and other courtesans were frequently referred
   to as “Cyprians” or of the “Cyprian corps.” These are euphemisms
   for whore.


10. Merry’s network in Florence and their joint publication of The
    Florence Miscellany in 1785 are crucial to an understanding of the
    later Della Crusca phenomenon; in the interest of space, I have had to
    cut my discussion of this background. I therefore recommend W. N.
    Hargreaves- Mawdsley’s comprehensive (if f lawed) The English Della
    Cruscans and Their Time, the only book- length study, and Roderick
    Marshall’s Italy in English Literature (174–236); see also Bostetter,
    Clifford, and Moloney.


11. I quote from The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (14 April
    1777): 4; see Bonnell 130.


12. The official website for the Accademia della Crusca (www.accademia-
    dellacrusca.it) translates this as “brigade of coarse bran” and provides
    a useful history from the 1570s to the present.

9780230100251_08_not.indd 2459780230100251_08_not.indd 245 12/28/2010 12:31:42 PM12/28/2010 12:31:42 PM

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