ABSTRACT
Maria Elizabeth Robinson has become a footnote in her mother’s biography. The daughter of actress and author Mary Robinson, the “English Sappho,” and her husband, Thomas, Maria Elizabeth is best known for completing Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, her mother’s posthumously published autobiography, and for compiling and editing her mother’s poetry. The chapter aims to treat Maria Elizabeth as an author in her own right and recover The Shrine of Bertha as an eighteenth-century gothic text deserving of critical attention. It explores the ways in which Maria Elizabeth’s writings expand our understanding of the relationship between gender and genre in the later eighteenth century. Although The Shrine of Bertha is virtually unknown today, it engages with the epistolary form in interesting ways. First, it recognizes the temporality of letter exchange; letters travel slowly between locations, meaning that good advice often arrives too late to be of use.
