THE LIFE OF MARY DARBY ROBINSON, actress, mistress, poet, mother, and novelist, illustrates the state of England and of Englishwomen during the shift from the eighteenth century to the Romantic era. Born in 1757 and dying, aged only forty-three, as the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth began, Robinson is at once exemplary and extraordinary: exemplary because she embodied so many of the possibilities open to women, and extraordinary because she lived out these possibilities for her own reasons and by her own lights.1 Her early life was conducted according to eighteenth-century possibilities and expectations: beginning as a virtuous wife, she became an actress famous for her beauty, and, in the best tradition of royal courtesans, had an affair with the Prince of Wales. She soon discovered that she had placed herself outside respectable English society: a woman’s sexual reputation, once stained, was treated like a signboard on which any sort of rumor might be posted, and London gossips provided plenty of material without too much reference to its validity.
A Romantic icon
Mary Robinson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of her: “I never knew a human being with so full a mind–bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full and overflowing.” Engraving by W. Dickinson, 1785. PRINT COLLECTION
While ordinary women who were rumored to be having sex outside wedlock had only their neighbors to worry about, Robinson found herself caricatured by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, whose satirical cartoons inform our view of the period. But Robinson also had unusual advantages: flattering images, engraved after paintings by Gainsborough, Romney, and Reynolds, among others, were recognized by thousands of people who never saw her in the flesh. The advent of these mass-produced images signals the transition from the older “face-to-face” culture, in which one’s world was composed of people one knew, to one in which newspapers and magazines made glamorous strangers familiar. The first part of Robinson’s life, during which her picture circulated around Britain as she and her carriage did around London–for she enjoyed her years of fame–illustrates this transition.
After 1783, Robinson’s life became less public when she suffered partial paralysis, possibly from a miscarriage. In later years she kept herself before the public eye in a different way: in addition to allowing her image to be spread everywhere, she disseminated her own words and published extensively. By the last year of her life, Mary Robinson had remade herself into both a Romantic heroine and a Romantic poet. What did this mean? Practically, it meant that she edited the poetry section of a newspaper and exchanged verses with a young poet named Samuel Taylor Coleridge; she admired Lyrical Ballads, which he and William Wordsworth published in 1798, now seen as a landmark of Romantic poetry. Quite independently of Wordsworth and Coleridge, she had published a volume of her own called Lyrical Tales. Artistically, it meant that the poetry Robinson was writing in 1800 would ally her with other Romantic poets.
In the traditional understanding of the term, Romantic artists prize the emotional over the rational, finding heroes and heroines in madmen and madwomen and, generally, in the members of the social body who suffer most. They value nature, solitude, and the sublime over cities, company, and mere prettiness. They tend toward mysticism in religion, and liberalism in politics. One of the most famous moments of British Romantic poetry is Wordsworth’s recollection of his visit to France soon after the Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!”2 Romantic artists believe that private integrity is more important than public reputation, that human beings are naturally good and that evil is a perversion of human character. Above all, Romantic artists see art as a vocation, where the eighteenth century often saw it as a profession or a craft. By the time of her death, Robinson was crippled, impoverished, dying, and nearly forgotten by the public. She wrote ceaselessly from a cottage in Windsor Forest on the outskirts of London with only her beloved daughter for company, and between writing and suffering she was an inspiration to both Coleridge and to herself. In this position, she was exactly the kind of disenfranchised, isolated, pained character on whom Romantic poets loved to dwell.
The world into which Mary Robinson was born in 1757 was local, intimate, bawdy, often corrupt, sometimes frolicsome, its inhabitants divided into many small groups based on blood, trade, religion, custom, and geography. Although Britons were conscious of and anxious about hierarchy and social distinctions, these were no longer as rigid as they had been in the early 1700s. By 1837, when the sixteen-year-old Victoria took the throne, the population of England and Wales (not including Ireland) had risen to about 15.9 million, from about 6.2 million a century before.3 Face-to-face culture had been replaced with one defined by print: a nation of neighbors had been replaced by one of novel readers. The small groups into which the population had been divided were melded to a perceptible degree into larger social classes: these included the aristocracy and gentry, but also growing numbers of industrial laborers, domestic servants, and a group that in the late eighteenth century began to be called “the middle class.”4
Robinson’s family belonged to the mercantile part of this last group. Her father, Nicholas Darby, was a sea captain in Bristol, then the second largest city in England and a center of the slave trade. She was taught at a school run by the Misses More, five sisters who taught the basics for girls–reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing–as well as the accomplishments: dancing, singing, French, Italian. Hannah More, the next-to-youngest of the sisters, would become one of Britain’s most prominent exponents of evangelical Christianity and conservative thought. In the 1760s, however, she was simply a young teacher, and in that capacity accompanied Mary Darby and other girls from the school to the opening night of the just-built theater in Bristol. Both the girl and the young woman were stage-struck, along with many others; the eighteenth century was one of the great periods of British theater, and the successful opening of theaters in smaller cities like Bristol was part of the growing urbanization and sophistication of British culture.
Mary Darby was still too young to do more than dream (if indeed she did) of going on the stage. During these years, the learning she obtained saved her–as education saved many other girls like her–from a future of real poverty. Boarding school education was not deep, but it left girls with imagination and energy, ready to earn a living by their pens. In any case, her family’s fortunes soon took a turn for the worse: her father embarked on a fishing venture in Labrador, and took up with another woman. Her mother, Hester, moved the family to London–then, as it had been for centuries, by far the largest city in Britain and a magnet for all who wished to make a new start. She availed herself there of one of the few respectable means by which a genteel woman could earn a living, and set up a school of her own. On the failure of his Canadian venture, Nicholas Darby returned to England and forced her to close it, fearing that a working wife would damage his reputation. This was entirely legal, and Hester Darby was without recourse. Years later, when Mary Robinson’s friend Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a political treatise in vindication of the rights of woman, and a novel in protest of the wrongs against them, this was the sort of injustice she had in mind.
It was perhaps these difficulties that led Mary Darby to marry so young, the faster to take herself off her mother’s hands. She did, at any rate, marry a young law clerk named Thomas Robinson before she was eighteen, only to discover that he had considerably misrepresented his income. Worse, he gambled, and soon betrayed her with other women. According to her posthumously published Memoirs, when he was imprisoned for debt she went with him, as a good wife did, into the Fleet Prison, where he conducted his intrigues even within the prison walls.
In prison Robinson helped her husband by a time-honored tactic: she found a patron, Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire. They met in a way that was conceivable only in the intimate world mentioned above. Robinson sent her recently published Poems (1775) to the Duchess, using her brother, “a charming youth,” as messenger–simply on the strength of having heard that the Duchess was fond of poetry. These were apprentice works on hackneyed late eighteenth-century models, but the Duchess was not a literary critic, and her generous response was an invitation to visit. (Robinson, since she was not the debtor herself, could enter and leave the Fleet at will.) The two young women liked each other, and the Duchess of Devonshire, an extraordinarily kind woman, offered friendship and some limited pecuniary aid.
A talent for self-transformation
Mary Robinson’s glamour and talent for self-transformation made her a much-watched figure in her time. The object of gossip and satire as the Prince of Wales’s mistress, and an extraordinary beauty painted by the best portraitists, Robinson herself adopted the persona of Sappho, famous as a woman poet who suffered for love. To make a living, she wrote novels such as Vancenza.
1 The posthumous chapbook version of Mary Robinson’s Vancenza (London, 1810). PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
2 Mary Robinson. Engraving by George Smith, after George Romney, 1781. PRINT COLLECTION
3 Frontispiece from Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon (London, 1796). PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
4 A satirical rendering of Mary Robinson and the Prince of Wales in facing cameos, from Town and Country Magazine (London, January 1781). GENERAL RESEARCH DIVISION
Thus far, Robinson had lived a completely eighteenth-century life. Patronage of the sort she received from the Duchess, indeed, continued a tradition that goes back much further than the eighteenth century. Robinson’s next steps, too, were so typical of the period that they are better described as stereotypical: penniless and adorable, with a toddler daughter and an unfaithful husband, she went on the stage at Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Drury Lane Theatre. She became a moderately successful actress, celebrated as much for her beauty as her talent, known for playing “breeches roles” that called for women to dress as men; in an era of gowns that reached the ground, this was a titillating way to show a woman’s legs. The Prince of Wales–the future George IV, who would be Regent from 1811 to 1820–saw her perform as Perdita in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and fell in love with her–thus, at least, Robinson’s memoirs have it; there is evidence that in fact they had met before this.5 After a good deal of anonymous wooing by messenger, he won her as his mistress. He would sign his notes “Florizel,” after the prince in the play. The affair lasted less than two years, but it was to haunt Robinson for the rest of her life. She was known by the name Perdita–“the lost one”–ever after. Indeed, if one of the requirements for being a Romantic female character is a certain degree of pathos (and there is every sign that Robinson cast herself in this role), she could not have chosen a better Shakespearean source than this bittersweet comedy.
Life, however, does not work according to plot devices, and although Robinson’s Memoirs don’t say so, she seems to have quite enjoyed her liaison with the prince. Certainly she enjoyed the publicity, riding in a carriage emblazoned with a basket that suspiciously resembled a coronet, and changing her appearance constantly: “To-day she was a paysanne, with her straw hat tied at the back of her head…. Yesterday she perhaps had been the dressed belle of Hyde Park, trimmed, powdered, patched, painted to the utmost power of rouge and white lead. Tomorrow she would be the cravatted Amazon of the riding-house; but be she what she might, hats of the fashionable promenaders swept the ground as she passed.”6
After the liaison with the Prince of Wales ended, there were, apparently, other men–the liberal politician Charles James Fox, the Earl of Cholmondeley, the Duke of Dorset, among others. It is not possible to say whether or not these rumors were true. More important is the fact that Robinson, over the next few years, gained the reputation of a courtesan, a woman famous for what she wore, where she went, and whom she slept with. In the mid-1780s courtesans had a transitional social status: already unmentionable in respectable company, such women’s names were on their way to being unprintable in the respectable press; but in these years everyone still liked to read about them. It was the beginning of a celebrity culture as we know it now, and many of the instruments of that culture–newspapers, magazines, gossip columns, cheaply reproducible images–were already available. Mary Robinson appeared in all of them, although the paradoxical consequence of her status as the prince’s mistress was that her theatrical career was largely curtailed.7
Robinson’s very visible life and the theatricality of her constant costume-changes became less acceptable over the 1780s and 90s, and one of the differences between the eighteenth century and the Romantic period is that the proper sphere for women seemed, ever more clearly, the domestic one: “[F]or a woman–‘the post of honor is a private station,’” as the poet Charlotte Smith wrote.8 Other poets, Felicia Hemans in particular, asserted that women were rooted to family and home as men were not. Women were able to learn very clearly what was expected of them from conduct books that were both popular reading and popular gifts, especially, one suspects, from parents who wished their teenaged daughters to learn how to behave better than their fashionable boarding schools had taught them.
Yet this emphasis on privacy and domesticity should not be understood as a sentence passed on all women, forbidding them to stir outside without a chaperone. Nor, of course, was the encouragement to domesticity new in the late eighteenth century. Women might be given conduct books, and they might even buy them for their own edification, but we should not assume that they followed their directions on how to conduct themselves any more than readers now follow diet books to the letter. Nonetheless, as the general ideas of diet books today float about the conversational atmosphere, so, to some degree, did the ideas of conduct books in the later eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Some women must have taken them quite seriously; some must have looked at the advice they were offered and laughed. Lives like Mary Robinson’s show us that some women reacted to a more forbidding public atmosphere by insisting on their right to move about freely. And while Robinson attracted her share of hostile publicity, she was also much admired.
Even so, the shift in ideology did mean that a different style of movement became necessary for women, inwardly more conscious of the demands of propriety and outwardly more conscious of the eyes of the neighbors and servants. There were plenty of women who had liaisons with men outside of wedlock during the nineteenth century, and even a few women who insisted that love and not vows made the important bond–the novelist George Eliot, for instance, who lived in an unmarried union with her fellow-writer George Henry Lewes. But the gaiety of Robinson’s early career, and her pleasure in making a public spectacle of herself, would have been impossible in the nineteenth century.
Guides for living
Conduct books offered advice on manners, religion, education, courtship, and love. Heavy on morality and short on fun, they were given by parents and schools to girls entering the marriage market (who likely preferred The Science of Love to Letters on the Improvement of the Mind). Mrs. Beeton’s extremely popular guide to good housekeeping was a later, more secular development.
1 Charles Allen, The Polite Lady: or, A Course of Female Education. In a Series of Letters, from a Mother to Her Daughter (London, 1760).
2 Sarah Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters (London, 1803).
3 The Science of Love, or, The Whole Art of Courtship, Made Familiar to Every Capacity, Containing Love-letters, Pleasing Conversations, Poems, & Songs. To Which Is Added an Appendix Instructing Persons of Both Sexes in the Choice of a Companion for Life (London, 1792).
4 Mrs. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: Addressed to a Lady (London, 1808).
5 John Armstrong, The Young Woman’s Guide to Virtue, Economy, and Happiness (Newcastle upon Tyne, ca. 1825).
6 Mrs. Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London, 1861).
7 William Giles, The Guide to Domestic Happiness (London, 1809). PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
In the mid-1780s, Robinson began a long-term relationship with Banastre Tarleton, a hero of the American Revolutionary War. They would never marry, since she was still the wife of Thomas Robinson. Divorce allowing remarriage was possible only through a private act of Parliament, and even a legal separation was difficult, expensive, and embarrassing to obtain. And, then, Robinson’s reputation was deeply stained; eventually Tarleton would leave her to marry and have children with a young woman from a suitable family.
In these years, however, he had recently left the army and was the Whig Member of Parliament for the growing city of Liverpool, on the mid-west coast of England. He was not known in civilian life for his intelligence, and Robinson gave him considerable help strategizing election campaigns and writing speeches.9 His positions, on the whole, were liberal, as Mary Robinson’s were. She believed that the vote should be extended to more than the tiny number of Britons (all men, and mostly landowners) who held it; she believed that birth and inheritance were far too powerful, and that room needed to be made for talented men and women without money or title; she believed that the rich had a responsibility to their nation that was ill repaid by their constant gambling; and she believed, along with many other Britons, both Whig and Tory, that the slave trade was wicked.
Whatever Banastre Tarleton believed privately, however, anti-slavery was hardly a position he could hold in public: his constituents, the merchants of Liverpool, made most of their money from buying people in Africa and selling them to plantations in the West Indies, or trading them for the sugar produced there by slave labor. Ironically, Robinson’s support for her lover may have extended to writing Tarleton’s parliamentary speeches defending what she privately thought was indefensible. Robinson’s own writing was firmly abolitionist, and her love for Tarleton may have led her into a deeply self-contradictory position. It was on such positions, as much as those supporting outright conquest, that the British empire was built.
Robinson’s better self, however, believed in liberty, equality, and fraternity, and when the French Revolution began in 1789, she wrote a long poem, “Ainsi va le monde” (“So goes the world”) to celebrate its promise. 1789 is one of the traditional dates by which to mark the beginning of the Romantic movement, and certainly, at least in Europe, the Revolution was the most important event of the century. It signified, suddenly and unmistakably, that things might be very different, that life might be arranged more equitably, that the unimportant people of the world might not always be the ones who paid for the pleasures of the rich. Robinson had a good deal of company, for many Britons reacted with joy at the early news of the Revolution. It seemed briefly that France was on its way to a parliamentary monarchy like their own, in which power was balanced between the king and the two Houses of Parliament. The changes in French law, besides extending the right to vote–though not so far as giving women suffrage–included a liberalization of divorce laws, a loosening of parents’ control over their children, and abolition of the aristocracy.
Mary Robinson on display
Mary Robinson appears here (at right; see detail on page 2) as Londoners often saw her, surrounded by a crowd of admirers at Vauxhall Gardens, one of the new pleasure parks designed for nighttime use. Visitors could range about the refreshment stands, box seats, tree-lined pathways, and ring for promenading, while watching concerts, fireworks displays, and, above all, other members of the fashionable world. Vaux-Hall, engraving by R. Pollard, after Thomas Rowlandson, 1784. PRINT COLLECTION
Reactions to the French Revolution
The caricaturist James Gillray began by satirizing everyone–Whigs and Tories, radical atheists as well as evangelical Christians–but the Tory government purchased his services with a secret pension, paid to him from late 1797 until early 1801 (when the Tories lost power). Here, in an illustration from The Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review, he savages literary supporters of the French Revolution: Mary Robinson’s novels pour out of the “cornucopia of ignorance,” while the poets Coleridge and Robert Southey, shown as asses, kneel to receive its bounty. James Gillray, New Morality;–or The Promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Theophilanthropes, 1798. PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
Early struggle for the vote
At least eleven people were killed, and hundreds wounded, when the local militia galloped into a peaceful crowd gathered at St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester on August 16, 1819. Their demand was political reform, starting with the vote, which was then highly restricted. The attack–quickly dubbed the “Peterloo Massacre,” after the French loss at Waterloo–shocked Britons everywhere, and the injuries inflicted on women, who had worn white to show the purity of their cause, drew particular outrage. An anonymous artist titled this contemporaneous etching and aquatint To Henry Hunt, Esq., one of the speakers at the meeting. PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
When fundamental change begins in one place, it gives hope to those elsewhere, and considerable numbers of workers and artisans in Britain felt that revolution did not need to stop with France. Groups such as the London Corresponding Society held mass meetings to support political reform, making demands that now seem self-evident: the right to vote, which they demanded for all adult men, was the first of these. It is difficult now to imagine a world in which the word “democracy” carried as much power to shock as it did in 1789, but the word’s root sense, “the rule of the people,” was entirely antithetical to a government arranged by and for the rich and well-born. As happens with any revolution, people of all classes could not stop talking and arguing about the meaning, extent, and implications of the events in France. Publications vindicating the rights of men, then women, then (satirically) children and animals were published. Robinson read and was heartened by two works of her friend Mary Wollstonecraft: the Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a response to the conservative politician Edmund Burke, and the more surprising Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). While Mary Robinson did not write a political work until later in life, the novels she had begun to write in 1791–largely to bring in money–are full of characters gleefully arguing about the Revolution, with those in favor awarded all the best lines.
But this early hopeful phase did not last long, and Edmund Burke’s pessimistic view of the Revolution came, after 1792, to be the one that most Britons shared. In particular the days of the 1793 Terror, when Maximilien Robespierre kept the blades of the guillotines wet with blood, turned the stomachs and changed the minds of many former supporters of the Revolution. Robinson herself had, in earlier days, been the guest of Marie Antoinette in Paris, and wrote a monody to the memory of the French queen, who followed her husband to the guillotine in 1793. At home, the government of England cracked down harshly on all resistance and paid for propaganda in prints like James Gillray’s 1798 New Morality (see pages 14–15). The war against the intellectuals is the focus here, and Robinson’s novel Walsingham is portrayed as part of the new rubbish to come from the supporters of the Revolution, along with other print and human icons of what was derisively known as English Jacobinism.
By 1800, the year of Robinson’s death, Britain had been at war with France and her allies for eight years, and would be for most of the fifteen following. Despite her ambivalence about the development of the Revolution, Robinson’s politics remained firmly on the side of the English Jacobins. Some of the most prominent of them were her friends: the philosopher William Godwin, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft, who would become his wife, and novelists like Mary Hays and Eliza Fenwick. All of these came from the same sort of middle-class background in which Robinson had been raised, and to which she had, financially at least, returned. Her days in high society were over by 1796, when Banastre Tarleton broke with her definitively. The stage was no longer a possibility since her physical movement was impaired, and Robinson leaned ever more heavily on her pen to make a living. In these last years she published, under a pseudonym, her only overtly political work, a short book inspired by Wollstonecraft, entitled Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799).
This was just one of the thirteen books Robinson wrote or published between 1792 and her death eight years later: they included novels, poetry, and two plays, in addition to the Letter. At the beginning of 1800, Robinson became the poetry editor for the London Morning Post. She was responsible for writing most of the poems that appeared there, but also oversaw the publication of works by others, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her poem “The Haunted Beach” led him to praise her meter; Wordsworth went further still and borrowed it for a poem of his own.10 But Robinson’s health was failing fast, and she, who had once made the rounds of fashionable London in her own carriage, found herself housebound on most days. She traveled in her imagination and published a series of essays in the Morning Post using the alter ego of a sylphid, a fairy creature that flies about town and observes the wicked and amusing doings of Londoners.
Having come full circle, let us consider more slowly what “Romanticism” means. By 1800, the artistic movement known as Romanticism was in full flower, although none of its participants would have called themselves “Romantics,” for the same reason that few participants in the movements of the 1960s would have labelled themselves as part of “the 60s”: names often don’t stick until enough time has passed that a movement can be seen from a step back. To poets of the year 1800, “romance” would still have had echoes of its oldest meaning: tales of knights and ladies, possibly involving magic potions and King Arthur or possibly, as in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a Far Eastern setting. For those of Mary Robinson’s generation and earlier, “romantic” meant fanciful, far-away, improbable, unconnected with real life.
The term also conjures up a far older artistic category, that of the sublime. When John Keats, for instance, compares his discovery of Homer’s poetry with the discovery of the Pacific by (as he wrongly thought) “stout Cortez,” he focuses on the sublime and awful quiet of the moment, when the Spanish conquistador and his men are struck “silent, upon a peak in Darien.” While the eighteenth-century poet might, stereotypically, appreciate a beautiful spring morning in a well-tended garden, a Romantic poet, stereotypically, might prefer to struggle through a howling rain by a storm-driven sea. On the other hand, “Romantic” has also come to imply the emotion-laden power of what is domestic and quotidian. In his poetic autobiography, The Prelude, Wordsworth remembers himself as a small boy riding his pony near his house, watching a young woman carrying a pitcher of water on her head over a plain, her clothing tossed by the winds: “It was, in truth, / An ordinary sight: but I should need / Colours and words that are unknown to man / To paint the visionary dreariness” of the scene.11
While these examples show protagonists at opposite ends of the earth, one a boy on home turf and the other a man in a world totally new to him, we should notice that they are both explorers. The impulse to explore is one of the central features of the artistic movement we call Romanticism, whether the object of exploration was inward–within one’s own self–or outward into unknown geography. For male writers, especially those who came from wealthy families, it was natural to imagine themselves traveling the world as explorers and adventurers. For women who had been taught that they belonged at home and that their most important job was bearing and raising children, however, exploration was a more complicated proposition.
One of the most famous instances of the Romantic brings together the domestic and the terrifying, the (apparently) feminine sphere of home, family, and motherhood, and the (apparently) masculine sphere of solitude in terra incognita–that is, Frankenstein, the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is now the most famous and most-often-read piece of Romantic literature. Much of its staying power comes from its contrasts of coziness (the scientist Victor Frankenstein’s home life and college life) with pathos (the creature absorbing Western culture through conversations heard through a cottage window while he himself is shut out in the cold) and the exotic (Frankenstein’s final chase of the creature across the polar ice), as well as episodes that are both familiar and terrifying: Frankenstein’s weird self-education in medieval alchemy, for example, and the creation of the monster itself, bringing together childbirth and grave robbery. Indeed, if one had to point to a single distinguishing feature of Romanticism, one might say that it is the evocation of the terrifying and mysterious in the everyday.
This is not the only feature of the Romantic movement that is important in Shelley’s book, however. Romantic poetry and prose are full of characters who are the victims of quotidian social injustice–legless soldiers, mistreated slaves, unmarried mothers who pine for their dead children. It was noted earlier that Mary Robinson, in her all-too-lifelike role of the suffering poet, was an ideal embodiment of one of these characters. These images owe some of their power to the eighteenth-century mode of sensibility in which the expression of emotion was given great cultural value. Sensibility translates easily to and from literature and embodied life: the pathos of Mary Robinson working through increasing pain in her Windsor Forest cottage, even her tiny funeral–at which the mourners consisted solely of the philosopher William Godwin and the poet John Wolcot–all of these made her deeply Romantic in her death. She herself emphasized the fuzziness of the border between life and literature by requesting that verses she had written for the grave of a character in one of her novels be used for her own–as they were. And we may see the influence of the Romantic point of view in the fact that even though she had earlier been castigated for her flagrantly sexual eighteenth-century persona, all of the biographical sketches that appeared in the years soon after her death lamented her as a woman who had, by her physical sufferings, repaired the damage her sexual sins had caused to the social fabric. If we still associate the Victorian era, stereotypically, with a disapproval of sexuality, we should remember that the prudery is tempered by a newly strengthened sympathy for victims and an ability to forgive transgressors.
The modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, with its evocation of the terrifying and mysterious in the everyday, is the most-often-read piece of Romantic literature. Its violent conjunctions still speak to us, posing questions about human nature, ethics, science, and parenthood. Frontispiece by W. Chevalier, from the London, 1831, edition. PFORZHEIMER COLLECTION
Finally, the Romantic notion one sees most often at play in the lives of the women of this book is that self-knowledge is valuable. It is difficult to know one’s self because that self is part of the mysterious world–but the knowledge is worth seeking, since it affords a lens through which one can perceive the mystery in everyday life. Often the cost of that knowledge is an uncomfortable self-consciousness by which this lens is ground and polished. Being unusual–and the women of this book, even the most retiring and politically conservative, are by definition unusual, living counter to the expectations of their day–can teach people to know who they are. Mary Robinson’s many representations of herself–as poet, actress, lover, novelist, sylphid, editor–remind us of the Enlightenment belief that the self is constructed from encounters with the world; but they also evoke the Romantic ideal of the human soul that has, through painful experience, come to know itself and to be able to share itself with others. Robinson’s self was a particularly rich one; as Coleridge described her to Robert Southey: “I never knew a human being with so full a mind–bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full and overflowing.”12 Not all of the women who appear here have minds as full as Robinson’s, but many of them sought and found an equally Romantic knowledge of themselves in the pages they wrote, in the romantic conquests they made, in the religions they served, in the natural phenomena they studied, in the paintings they made, in the crimes they committed, and even safe in the bosoms of their loving families. This is paradoxical, but to be an extraordinary woman in this era was–as it is still in our own–a contradictory state of affairs.