ABSTRACT
Regularly the subject of cartoonists and satirical novelists, Mary Robinson achieved public notoriety as the mistress of the young Prince of Wales (George IV). Her association with figures such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and comparisons with Charlotte Smith, make her a serious figure for scholarly research.
Part II Volume 5 Editor: William D Brewer Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story (1797) For the first three volumes of Walsingham, Sir Sidney Aubrey appears to be the title-character's male rival, 'the seducer' of the woman he loves, but near the end of the fourth and final volume the protagonist abruptly learns that Sir Sidney is a woman. Although Sidney's position as a rich male baronet gives her freedoms denied late eighteenth-century women, her closeted sexual identity becomes a burden that nearly destroys her. The novel suggests that gender is performative and, through its portrait of an emotionally volatile 'pupil of nature' who (unwittingly) fights a duel with one woman and seduces and ultimately destroys another, critiques the eighteenth-century valorization of the man of feeling. Volume 6 Editor: Julie A Shaffer The False Friend: A Domestic Story (1799) In The False Friend Robinson explores two themes that recur throughout her writings: incest and illegitimacy. The novel focuses on the quest of the orphaned Gertrude St. Leger to discover her parentage and form an identity in a corrupt society swarming with manipulative, treacherous, and predatory men (false friends). Her mysterious and mercurial guardian, Lord Denmore, fails to tell his ward that she is his daughter, the product of an adulterous love affair, and she becomes infatuated with him, not realizing that her passion for him is incestuous. Gertrude's loss of her maternal genealogy, symbolized by the erasure of her dead mother's portrait and her accidental fragmentation of Sappho's bust (for which her mother was the model), stunts her emotional and social development. The mistakes of her parents doom the innocent and chronically depressed heroine of this darkly pessimistic novel. Volume 7 Editor: Hester Davenport The Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel (1799) Set in England and revolutionary France, The Natural Daughter invites comparisons between male oppressors of women in England and the fanatical Jacobins Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre, who are presented as womanizing terrorists. The heroine, Martha Morley, is vilified and ostracized by a hypocritically moralistic society for befriending an abandoned infant, who is immediately assumed to be her natural, or illegitimate, daughter. Repudiated by her dysfunctional husband and family, she desperately seeks to make her living, as Robinson did, as an actress and author. In this novel, Robinson frequently shifts back and forth from scenes of Gothic terror and mystery to satirical portrayals of the boorish nouveau riche merchant class. Memoirs of Mrs Mary Robinson This is the first republication of the Memoirs which follows Robinson's original manuscript rather than the version published later by her daughter Maria Robinson. Much material was cut or altered for publication and this edition lists all textual variants. Letters from Mary Robinson The few extant letters from Mary Robinson are published here. Volume 8 Editors: William Brewer and Sharon M Setzer The Lucky Escape (performed 1778) Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France (1791) Nobody, a Comedy in Two Acts (performed 1794) Robinson's dramatic afterpiece Nobody is an unpublished satire on female gamesters. One of the characters in Walsingham, Lady Amaranth, describes how members of London high society can close down plays they dislike by disrupting them. This was the fate that befell Nobody, which was withdrawn after the Whig elite instructed their servants to drown out the performances with applauses and hisses. The comedy provides an illuminating context for the sections of Walsingham that lampoon 'the tribunal of literary judgment' that determined the success or failure of authors in late eighteenth-century London. The Sicilian Lover (1796) A Letter to the Women of England (1799) 'The Sylphid Essays', Morning Post (October 1799-February 1800) 'Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England', Monthly Magazine (August-November 1800) 'Memoirs and Anecdotes of Eminent Persons', Monthly Magazine (February-August 1800) 'Biographical Sketches' (1800-1) 'Jasper' (1801) Recalling her best-known poem, "The Haunted Beach," Robinson's unfinished novel Jasper begins with a shipwreck.
