ABSTRACT

Mary Robinson's continual puffing and pillorying in the newspapers had made her a highly visible figure by the end of her life, one to be reckoned with. But she wanted literary posterity; as the inscription she chose for her burial stone tellingly announces, she wanted to "snatch a wreath beyond the grave". Charlotte Dacre's interest in Robinson as a poetic interlocutor was shaped by her biography as well as Robinson's style. Dacre's relation to this text would have been complex, for her father and Robinson presented two models of how outsiders could make their way in the world through their cunning and writing skill, despite their continual disparagement in the press. Robinson had begun writing her Memoirs in 1798 and was constructing her collected works when she died on 26 December 1800. Dacre had her own reasons to be concerned about the deadening effects o.