ABSTRACT
In an early part of her Memoirs, Mary Robinson bemoans her state as she reflects on her ability to commune with nature: “Unquestionably the Creator formed me with a strong propensity to adore the sublime and beautiful of his works! But it has never been my lot to meet with an associating mind, a congenial spirit, who could (as it were abstracted from the world) find an universe in the sacred intercourse of the soul, the sublime union of sensibility.” 1 Robinson had begun her Memoirs in 1798, already in ailing health, as one of the many efforts she made in the last years of the 1790s to solidify a reputation for herself as a Romantic writer. Though she never completed these Memoirs before her death (she only got as far as her affair with the Prince of Wales; her daughter finished them), they reveal a writer intent on creating sympathy for herself as a victim of a “too acute sensibility” who turned to “literary labor” at first as a means of survival. 2 Her claim never to have found “an associating mind” appears a bit disingenuous, however—another one of Robinson’s gestures at representing herself, as other poets were increasingly doing, as an original and tormented Genius; for as early as 1797, Robinson had begun an exchange with another figure who functioned in many ways as the sort of “congenial spirit” she sought: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 3 Their individual 40poems and poems to each other were being regularly published in The Morning Post. And on 15 January 1800, when Robinson was poetry editor of The Morning Post, Robinson and Coleridge finally met. During that year, Robinson’s last, they exchanged several poems and letters and shared an interest in opium-induced reverie, parenting, and a desire for poetic reputation (and perhaps even a mixed admiration, envy, and competitiveness with William Wordsworth). 4 Coleridge went on to be one of Robinson’s biggest supporters after her death. 5
