ABSTRACT
England may enumerate at the present area, a phalanx of enlightened women, such as no other nation ever boasted. Their writings adorn the literature of the country; they are its ornaments, as they ought to be its pride. Conservative reviewers blamed "Jacobin Morality" and saw in such disregard to nature no less than the destruction "of domestic, civil and political society". Mary Robinson's philosophical, political and literary relationship to Wollstonecraft is incontrovertible. Robinson's affinity with Wollstonecraft took time to develop as her understanding of her authorial identity evolved. Robinson increasingly presented the literary woman as her ideal masculine woman, a figure that eventually expanded to include the wide range of women intellectuals involved in print culture that she cites in Letter. Robinson also reframes the contents of Vossius's catalogue in a self-reflexive gesture that both confirms her place in that literary history and avers her importance as one of its narrators.
