The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Bell’s Laureates I 21

which is limiting because it assumes that the pseudonyms are

characters with coherence and consistency. But my conception of

pseudonym- as- avatar also distinguishes Robinson’s avatars from the

trope of pseudonym- as- disguise, which provides a writer with ways

of effacing his or her authentic self for protection from persecution

or prosecution, as would become necessary in Pitt’s England after

1794; or the public disguise which allows for the preservation of

one’s sense of a more legitimate authorial self, as Southey, for exam-

ple, used pseudonyms for his newspaper verse as a way of maintaining

the integrity of his actual signature. Southey uses his pen names and

anonymity to hide, to elide from his professional self the commercial

exchange of occasional poetry for money. Robinson never really uses

her pseudonyms this way and continues to use certain pseudonyms

even after her true identity is known. In other words, it does not

matter if people know her true identity because the pseudonym is just

another version of her authorial self. Robinson uses her pen- names

not merely to network with actual associates but to network with

popular culture and literary tradition. The avatar is the figurative

incarnation of the textual and contextual identity adopted by a poet,

and thus allows for a multiplicity of poetic performances. Any one of

Robinson’s avatars, to put it another way, is not unlike a brand- name.

But, at the same time, I would argue that this proliferation is not

merely self- promotion, although that is certainly one of Robinson’s

goals in nearly everything that she wrote; instead, I see Robinson’s

pseudonyms as fundamentally literar y in that they inform the reading

of the poems to which they are attached.

I focus on Robinson’s poetry as it appears in newspapers because

this is where she primarily used the avatars – with the notable excep-

tion of Ainsi va le monde, which I discuss in chapter two.^2 Since

Robinson’s use of avatars is neither more nor less authentic or per-

formative, each avatar is simply another version of a potential poetic

self, one that is partly a refraction of a professional self and one that

we cannot assume to be coherent; the network of texts and authors

established by the newspaper provides a means for generating a mul-

tiplicity of selves instead of effacing or disguising the self or identity.

The avatar is the incarnation of poetic legitimacy once it asserts itself

in a literary network—even if it is a fiction. As Robinson or perhaps

Bell asserts in the “Dedication” to her 1791 Poems,

Mrs. ROBINSON has the particular gratification of knowing that the

efforts of her pen were warmly, and honourably patronized under

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