ABSTRACT

In October 1796, Robinson published her sequence, Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets. As an assertion of her poetic authority in the literary public sphere, and in the revival of the sonnet in particular, Sappho and Phaon signals its difference from the pseudonymous newspaper verse for which Robinson was primarily known. Elegiac Sonnets offered an example of a brilliant marketing strategy and a new sonnet brand. Its rhetorical power depended on the very thing it denied: readers. While Smith and Bowles initially had "gratified the public ear", the excessive production that followed turned the genre into the latest poetic fashion. If Robinson's early sonnets made her part of the revival's "race of sonnet writers", they did not make her part of the Smith-Bowlesian tribe, though not for want of trying. In September 1793, the newspapers announced that Smith's son's foot had to be amputated after he was wounded at the Siege of Dunkirk.