by Paula Byrne
The Sicilian Lover: a Tragedy went into print a few weeks after Angelina. Mary had heard that someone had pilfered one of its plot lines for a play of their own. She was annoyed that Drury Lane had let her down again: ‘Disgusted with the delay, and universal negative which, for some unknown cause, she ever experienced from managers, she resolved to print the tragedy, and leave its merits and defects to the decision of the public.’29 One man who admired it was the Duke of Leeds, a neighbour in St James’s Square, whose wife had left him for Mad Jack Byron, father of the poet. He sent Mary a poem describing her as ‘the queen of song’, together with an effusive letter:
Madam,
Permit me to thank you for the favour you conferred on me, by sending me your tragedy. I trust you will not deem me guilty of flattery when I assure you that few productions of the present poetical age have afforded me more pleasure, than the perusal of the second act; the scene between Honoria and her father is very well managed, and capable of much effect; as is the scene with the banditti in the third.
I imagine many will unite with me in observing how much your continuing to persevere in this species of composition would increase your profit, and enhance your poetical reputation; which has already much signalized itself in the rich field of English literature.30
He could not have been more wrong: four months after publication, thirty-two copies had been sold. The net result was that, having earlier drawn some of her profits, Mary owed her publishers, Hookham and Carpenter, £133. 13s. 1d. She never paid the money back.31
Almost every poet of the age attempted the impossible task of writing a Shakespearean tragedy, usually with a Gothic setting involving castles, robbers, caves, and moonlight, all decked in pastiche Elizabethan language:
Peace! Be silent. Heard you not the tempest
That shook our lofty towers from their foundation?
Saw you the black wing of the howling blast
Sweeping our turrets, red with human gore?
Mary’s effort has a similar theme to the much more successful Angelina: a father selling his daughter into the slavery of marriage.
Relentless power may drag me to the altar;
But the free soul shrinks from the tyrant’s grasp,
And lords it o’er oppression.32
Honoria’s lover kills her father and she is finally reconciled with her mother, now a nun in a convent, before her own death. Some reviewers liked this sort of thing: ‘he who can read its incidents without sympathy, and its imagery without delight, must have an unfeeling heart and a depraved taste. We congratulate Mrs Robinson that she has discovered the true bent of her talents; and we advise her to apply herself in the future to the improvement of them in the same walk.’33 This judgement is far off the mark: it was as a novelist, satirist, and social commentator that Mary’s true talents lay. Her European reputation witnessed to that: when a Leipzig publisher decided to launch some ‘specimens of English Literature’, Robinson’s novels were the first to be chosen – ‘very neatly printed, and embellished with engravings’.34 Her first six novels were translated into both French and German, sometimes in competing versions. Six of the seven novels were also produced in Dublin editions for the Irish market.
Her rise to international success as an author was offset by a decline from the status of ‘somebody’ to that of ‘nobody’ in the fashionable world. Mary did still go to the opera and the theatre, but she no longer appeared in the prominent boxes. Laetitia Hawkins was coming out of the opera one night when she observed a woman of fashionable appearance, still beautiful but not ‘in the bloom of beauty’s pride’. The woman was sitting on a table in one of the waiting rooms, unnoticed, ‘except by the eye of pity’. In a few minutes, two liveried servants came to her. They took from their pockets long white sleeves, which they drew on their arms. They lifted her up and conveyed her to her carriage. ‘It was,’ wrote Hawkins, ‘the then helpless paralytic Perdita!’35
*She added a wittily self-deprecatory footnote, ‘always wrong in a quotation’. She may be misquoting the opening of Coleridge’s lovely sonnet ‘To the River Otter’: ‘Dear native Brook!’
CHAPTER 22
Radical
The limbs may languish, but the mind can’t faint,
Genius like freedom bows not to restraint;
‘Down with all tyrants’ strikes upon my ear!
Alas! I’ve got a female Robespierre.
Banastre Tarleton, manuscript verses to
Mary Robinson
During these years, Mary met two men who were to become good and loyal friends. They were both to have an enormous impact on her work, as she was to influence them. One was the philosopher and radical William Godwin, the other the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Godwin recorded the beginning of his friendship with Mary in one of his autobiographical sketches. Discussing the year 1796 he writes, ‘I was also introduced about this time by Merry, the poet, to a most accomplished and delightful woman, the celebrated Mrs Robinson.’1
Godwin was interested in her because her social philosophy was similar to his own. Her long poem ‘The Progress of Liberty’, filled with denunciations of despotism and war, advances the Godwinian thesis that a new age of liberty and peace was arising from the workings of Reason:
And Nature, towering mid the wrecks of war,
Shall bless her British shores, which grandly lift
Their rocky bulwarks o’er the howling main,
Firm and invincible, as Britain’s sons,
The sons of Reason! unappall’d and free!2
The shy bachelor Godwin thought that Mary Robinson was not only intelligent and ‘Rational’, but also incomparably beautiful. His daughter Mary Shelley recorded that ‘Among his acquaintances were several women, to whose society he was exceedingly partial, and who were all distinguished for personal attractions and talents. Among them may be mentioned the celebrated Mary Robinson, whom to the end of his life he considered as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but though he admired her so greatly, their acquaintance scarcely attained intimate friendship.’3
Godwin’s friendship with Mary was more extensive and intimate than his daughter knew (or admitted). He was a friend and supporter of many literary women, such as Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Now he added another Mary to his circle of female intellectuals. He had recently been reintroduced to Mary Wollstonecraft after her time in France and Scandinavia, and her separation from her lover Gilbert Imlay, and was beginning to fall in love with her. He was also reading Angelina as Wollstonecraft was reviewing it.
Godwin’s unpublished journal records his meetings with Mary Robinson. On 9 February he took ‘tea with Mrs Robinson with Twiss and Tarleton’.4 Francis Twiss was a contemporary of Mary’s who hailed from Bath. A drama critic, he was married to Fanny Kemble, sister of Mrs Siddons, and was a close friend of Wollstonecraft’s. The next day, Godwin took tea with his friend Elizabeth Inchbald, the novelist and dramatist, and then went on for supper with Mary and Tarleton. Merry, the Della Cruscan, was also there. Godwin had supper with Mary five times that month and also had tea and attended the theatre with her. At a performance of William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer they bumped into another literary man, C—, who – as was seen in a previous chapter – was also present at two of Mrs Robinson’s supper parties at this time.
In March Godwin saw Mary and Maria Elizabeth at the Drury Lane dramatization of his novel Caleb Williams, renamed The Iron Chest. On a snowy day later the same month he finished his scrupulously slow reading of Angelina. Later in the year he turned his attention to young Maria Elizabeth’s Shrine of Bertha. He was regularly taking tea with Mary and Tarleton, and also meeting other literary folk, such as the novelist Eliza Parsons, at her supper table. In the summer, a party was made up consisting of Godwin and three of the most distinguished female writers of the age: Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, and Robinson.
As Mary became more closely involved with this circle of radical friends, she grew distant fr
om Tarleton. Though he was perceived as a dangerous Jacobin sporting a revolutionary ‘crop’ haircut as he fought an election campaign in Liverpool against his own brother John, a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, he was in no position to support all his partner’s radical causes. She was publishing powerful anti-slavery poems in the magazines and papers, while he was still compromised by his family interest in the traffic in human flesh.
In October 1796, a new volume of Mary’s poetry was published: Sappho and Phaon, a series of legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, & Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess. It has been supposed that she wrote this sequence on being deserted by Tarleton, but Godwin’s journal reveals that Tarleton was present at her supper parties and accompanied her on theatre visits throughout the months leading up to the book’s publication. But she had been through the experience of separation from him, and from previous lovers, so she had no difficulty in writing from the point of view of the mother of ancient Greek lyric poetry, Sappho, who, according to Ovid and other sources, fell hopelessly in love with a handsome youth called Phaon and then committed suicide by throwing herself off a cliff when he deserted her.
The collection served as her poetic manifesto. Already known as ‘the English Sappho’ she now sought to detach herself from the Della Cruscans and the passing world of newspaper versification. In her preface to the sonnet sequence, she defended the ‘legitimate’ sonnet form of Petrarch (fourteen lines divided into an octave and a sestet) and condemned ‘the non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters’ that filled the newspapers. She was setting herself up as a classical, intellectual poet. She complained that British poets were not given their due recognition (‘It is at once a melancholy truth, and a national disgrace, that this Island, so profusely favored by nature, should be marked, of all enlightened countries, as the most neglectful of literary merit!’) and she paid tribute to her ‘illustrious country-women; who, unpatronized by the courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble themselves by the unperishable lustre of MENTAL PRE-EMINENCE!’5 ‘Unpatronized by the courts’ may well be a dig at the Prince.
Sappho was associated with passionate abandon and lyrical intensity. Mary’s account of her reads like an idealized self-portrait: ‘such a lively example of the human mind, enlightened by the most exquisite talents, yet yielding to the destructive controul of ungovernable passions’. She says that Sappho was the ‘unrivalled poetess of the time: the envy she excited, the public honours she received, and the fatal passion which terminated her existence, will, I trust, create that sympathy in the mind of the susceptible reader, which may render the following poetical trifles not wholly uninteresting’.6 Like most eighteenth-century accounts of Sappho, the brief biography that Mary includes in the prefatory material to her collection of poems only makes the briefest and most guarded reference to her presumed lesbianism: Sappho was regarded as a great love poet, a great technical innovator in poetical form, but – despite her origins on Lesbos – not primarily a ‘sapphic’ poet in the modern sense. There was much more emphasis on her being abandoned by men than on her love for women. Mary was called ‘the English Sappho’ as a compliment to her technical proficiency and her strong sensibility, not as a comment on her sexuality.
The collection consists of forty-four linked sonnets, telling the story of Sappho’s passion for Phaon from its birth to her demise. Arguably the first narrative sonnet sequence since Elizabethan times, it did much – along with the sonnets of Charlotte Smith – to revive a poetic form that had fallen out of favour in the eighteenth century. Ever since Petrarch, the vast majority of sonnet sequences had been written from the male point of view. It was a refreshing change for the woman to be the gazer instead of the gazed upon: ‘Why, when I gaze on Phaon’s beauteous eyes, / Why does each thought in wild disorder stray?’7 At the same time, Mary is acutely aware of how a woman makes herself desirable – for instance, by a dress that suggests but also conceals:
Bring the thin robe, to fold about my breast,
White as the downy swan; while round my waist
Let leaves of glossy myrtle bind the vest,
Not idly gay, but elegantly chaste!
Love scorns the nymph in wanton trappings dressed;
And charms the most concealed, are doubly grac’d.8
She also knows the contradictions of desire: ‘Ah! why is rapture so allied to pain?’ And, as the sequence comes to its climax, sustained imagery of stormy seas, the yawning ocean, and plunging waves serves to evoke the troubled mind of the deserted lover, while preparing the way for Sappho’s death by water. The association of contemplation, desertion, and the sea may also allude to the second Reynolds portrait that had by this time, thanks to the frequency with which it was engraved and used as frontispiece to Mary’s works, become the iconic image of her. It was also around this time that she returned to Hoppner’s studio and was painted in a simple white ‘Grecian’ robe and a classical headdress, with the sea behind her.
The volume was generously reviewed. Meanwhile, the fashionable world was stunned by the news of a real-life separation: after an indecently short period of marriage, the Prince of Wales had deserted his wife Caroline. There was a wave of support for the Princess. Having been spurned by George herself, Mary knew where her sympathies lay. To judge from the attack on her in a pamphlet defending the Prince, she must have let her position be known in public:
It cannot be supposed, that Mrs ROBINSON, or the Perdita, or the lame Sappho, or what you will, would, in the moment that she is receiving an annuity of five hundred pounds from the bounty of the PRINCE, unite in the interested cabal who labor to tarnish his good name; – she should have remained, at least, inactive during the crooked course of the floating falsehood. How lamentable it would be to admit, that the force of any species of jealousy can awaken impertinences, and connect ideal events, for the unwarrantable purpose of suppressing an unoffending individual whom we envy, but whom it was intended by Truth and Nature we should respect! – But it is not possible – Mrs ROBINSON’S morality cannot be so far unhinged.9
Mary’s immensely productive year came to an end with the publication of her fourth novel, a Gothic extravaganza called Hubert de Sevrac: A Romance of the Eighteenth Century. De Sevrac is a French aristocratic émigré who becomes ‘the convert of liberty’. Set in the turmoil of the French Revolution, Hubert and his family are dispossessed of their fortune and status. They have to disguise themselves as peasants to pass the gates of Paris. Hubert’s daughter is Sabina, who empathizes with the peasants: ‘Have not the poor, minds, as well as the rich.’10 The family are imprisoned after Hubert fights a duel and there is a last-minute escape from the guillotine. The moral of the whole is the Godwinian idea that ‘the vices of the rich produce the crimes of the poor’.11
Written in great haste as a money-spinner, this is probably her worst novel. Mary more or less admits as much in her next book, Walsingham, in which a character closely based on herself writes a romance ‘of ghosts, ghouls, graves, blood-stained hands, daggers, caverns, velvet canopies and livid lightings’ designed to ‘frighten schoolgirls’.12 Coleridge wrote a brief and judicious review:
The character of Mrs Robinson’s novels being generally known, it is perhaps sufficient to say, that Hubert de Sevrac is inferior to her former productions. It is an imitation of Mrs Radcliffe’s romances, but without any resemblance that may not be attained by the common pen. There are detached parts, however, of which we may speak with approbation; and, during the prevalence of the present taste for romances, the whole may afford amusement to the supporters of circulating libraries. But it may be necessary to apprise novel-writers in general, that this taste is declining and that real life and manners will soon assert their claims.13
Wollstonecraft was also properly critical, suggesting that the problem was that the novel was written much too quickly:
Mrs Robinson writes so rapidly that she scarcely allows herself to diges
t her story into a plot, or to allow those incidents gradually to grow out of it, which are the fruit of matured invention. She certainly possesses considerable abilities; but she seems to have fallen into an errour, common to people of lively fancy, and to think herself so happily gifted by nature, that her first thoughts will answer her purpose. The consequence is obvious; her sentences are often confused, entangled with superfluous words, half-expressed sentiments, and false ornaments. In writing the present romance Mrs Radcliffe appears to be her model; and she deserves to rank as one of her most successful imitators: still the characters are so imperfectly sketched, the changes of scene so frequent, that interest is seldom excited, and curiosity flags … She could write better, were she once convinced that the writing of a good book is no easy task.14
Mary herself later said that one of her regrets was that most of her works ‘had been composed in too much haste’. It was good for her to have some proper critical reviews written by friends, in contrast to the puffs of the Oracle, which, needless to say, considered that ‘the grateful terrors of the first volume are displayed with infinite address, and the greatest force of language’.15
This said, the novel is not without effective local details in its observations of morals and manners. Conservative reviewers preferred these to the novel’s dangerous politics: ‘there are interspersed through the whole many reflections on the conduct of human life, which shew the author to be an attentive observer of the manners of the world, and consequently better qualified to instruct it than most who undertake this species of composition. What we least approve of in this work is an evident partiality towards French Philosophy, and something too much of the cant of French Democracy.’16