70 The Poetry of Mary RobinsonBell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry—and, most exciting,
“finely engraved” “PORTR AITS of the REAL AUTHORS.” The portraits
were, of course, not of Merry and Cowley but of their avatars, imag-
ined and idealized. Bell also added Robinson’s Laura poems.
But Laura had ceased to exist. After the debut of the Oracle, only
two poems by Robinson appeared in the World. A short version of
the poem that would be called “Life” in her 1791 volume and “To
the Memory of Werter” both appeared with the Laura avatar, on
15 June and 15 July, respectively. According to the 1791 volume,
Robinson wrote the latter poem in Germany in 1786, likely after
reading Daniel Malthus’s English translation of Goethe’s novel; it
includes Robinson’s only apostrophe to Sensibility—“Thy pow’r, O
Sensibility! in magic charms to speak” (1: 61; 24) —thus marking
it as a poem of the 1780s like others by Charlotte Smith and Helen
Maria Williams. But despite Robinson’s later dating of the poem,
it also may respond to Della Crusca’s “Elegy, Written after Having
Read the Sorrows of Werter,” which appeared in the World on 26
July 1787 and subsequently in The Poetry of the World. Certainly, its
appearance in the World may have reminded readers of Della Crusca’s
poem. Robinson’s poem, however, is more complicated than Merry’s
because, where his focuses on a justification of Werter’s suicide, hers
develops a deeper rumination on the effect of the novel on the reader,
particularly on a female reader who may be more inclined to sympa-
thize with Werter. The other poem, later ironically entitled “Life,”
is a litany of ephemeral joys and inevitable sorrows that closes with
the image of Death as “a welcome Friend, / That bids the Scene of
Sorrow end” (1: 59; 27–8). With these two morbid expositions of
Sensibility, Robinson’s Laura avatar bids farewell to the World.
The change in context required a new avatar, so Robinson drops
the Laura avatar shortly after Bell begins publishing the Oracle.
Instead, she becomes Laura Maria, the avatar with which she would
be most closely identified throughout her career. This new avatar
shows Robinson’s eagerness to reconcile her pseudonyms with her
actual professional self. Obviously, this new creation fuses what is sig-
nified by the Laura avatar along with a variation of her own name—
which itself, too, carries a signifying power but is here deliberately
divested, in a sense, of its infamous and ignominious associations.
Laura Maria is a pseudonymous oxymoron, half metaphorical and half
revelatory. With Laura Maria, Robinson claims the cultural cachet
that she had earned as a Shakespearean actress and as the subject of
portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney; and she encour-
aged the recognition of the avatar as an idealized version of herself.9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 709780230100251_04_ch02.indd 70 12/28/2010 11:08:26 AM12/28/2010 11:08:26 AM
10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel RobinsonCopyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket iTr
omso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-13