Chapter 1

Bell’s Laureates I: Robinson’s

Avatars and the Della Crusca

Network

Are you Anna Matilda, or Della Crusca, or Laura Maria?

Comical creatures! they have made me shed many a tear, though I

never more than half understood them.

—Robinson, The Natural Daughter (1799)

In this brief passage from her final novel, Robinson provides the

best commentary of the past 200 years on what the so- called Della

Cruscans were doing in their poetry. With good humor, Robinson

parodies yet implicitly defends the poetry that made her famous and

that she never completely abandoned. In The Natural Daughter,

the heroine, Martha Morley, after attempting a career on the stage,

turns to poetry as a professional recourse. Mirroring some elements

of Robinson’s own history, Martha endures the vicissitudes of being

a professional woman writer and, in dire straits, determines to seek

the patronage of an aristocratic woman. In order to earn this support,

Martha is put on display as a young “poetess” before a group of ladies

and gentleman, who are, in the words of the potential patron, “ ‘sev-

eral excellent judges and some successful authors’ ” (7: 132). Thus

humiliated she must read aloud from her odes, which she describes

as “rather allegorical than serious” in order to assure her potential

patron that they are not “pathetic” or mournfully sad (7: 131). Here,

Robinson makes an important point about her own odes—a form, at

this time, in which she had not worked for several years but one that

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

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