The Works of Mary Robinson, Part I

Part I Volumes 1 and 2 Editor: Daniel Robinson Poems Robinson's contemporaries dubbed her 'the English Sappho'. An ardent admirer of her poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared her 'a woman of undoubted Genius', and he praised the meter of her poem 'The Haunted Beach' in a letter to his fellow poet Robert Southey: 'ay! that Woman has an Ear'. A prolific poet, she wrote Della Cruscan verse under a variety of pseudonyms, political and satirical poems, a long sonnet sequence entitled Sappho and Phaon (1796), and a volume entitled Lyrical Tales (1800) that reflects the influence of Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798). Robinson often reprinted her poems, which appeared in variant forms in newspapers, her novels, and in volumes of poetry. This collection will be the first complete and scholarly edition of Robinson's poetry ever published and will include periodical verse that did not appear in the posthumous 1806 Poetical Works. Editor: Dawn Vernooy-Epp Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity (1792) Set in fifteenth-century Spain, Vancenza is both a cautionary tale about the dangers of female credulity and a Gothic romance. The protagonist, Elvira, is a beautiful and naive orphan of unknown parentage who uses her veil to bandage a wounded Prince. The Prince falls in love with her, and, after a series of misadventures, they become engaged. Before the wedding, however, she discovers a manuscript that reveals that she is the Prince's half-sister. Horrified by the prospect of marrying her own brother, she expires. Written when the Gothic craze was at its height, Vancenza went into five editions by 1794. Robinson revisited the theme of incest in her penultimate novel, The False Friend. The Widow, or a Picture of Modern Times (1794) Robinson's second novel, The Widow, is heavily influenced by Frances Burney's Evelina. Like its predecessor, it is an epistolary social satire, and the sadistic treatment of simple country people by the idle landed gentry in The Widow recalls the abuse of lowborn octogenarian women who are compelled to race each other in Evelina. The protagonist, Julia St. Laurence, is a Philadelphian who has come to England in search of her English husband, who was separated from her when his regiment was transferred to another part of America. Although living in seclusion, she is harassed by an unprincipled rake and has numerous opportunities to observe the vices of English high society. The novel also features Lady Seymour, a frivolous and superficial pleasure seeker who is reformed into a virtuous wife. The second-last chapter of The Widow contains a panegyric to Robinson's former lover, the Prince of Wales. Volume 3 Editor: Sharon M Setzer Angelina; A Novel (1796) Angelina received a rave review from Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Robinson met in 1796, and it echoes many of the ideas that Wollstonecraft formulated in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In their letters, Robinson's characters critique male gallantry, denounce financially and socially advantageous marriages that legally prostitute women, expatiate on the dangers of excessive sensibility, observe that women can be sexually promiscuous as long as they preserve the reputation for chastity, and compare oppressed women to African slaves. Sir Edward Clarendon, the heroine's father, is both a West Indian slave owner and a tyrannical parent who attempts to sell his daughter to an aristocrat to improve his family's social standing. This novel suggests that filial disobedience can in some cases be a virtue. Volume 4 Editor: Orianne Smith Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (1796) Heavily influenced by Ann Radcliffe's romances, Hubert de Sevrac chronicles the misadventures of an aristocratic emigre family who flees from revolutionary France to Gothic Italy. Hubert is both a male and female bildungsroman in which the title-character, a French Marquis, eventually abandons the chivalric, elitist ideology of the old regime and assumes a new identity as an expatriate and family man, and his politically enlightened daughter learns the folly of religious superstitions. Writing during a period of anti-revolutionary hysteria in England, Robinson boldly (and perhaps recklessly) eulogizes the storming of the Bastille in the novel's third and final volume.