Perdita

by Paula Byrne

  These last months are the only period of Mary’s life from which a substantial number of her letters survive. They give a powerful sense of her place among a small but loyal circle of friends, as in the following, to one of the Porter sisters:

  On Tuesday, my charming and amiable friend, we will enjoy your society – I shall leave town soon after that day, for I do not find myself the better for the warm atmosphere of London; and I fear a relapse, – because I know that there are Beings whose society makes life desirable! If your lovely cheek does not wear a conscious smile – I am mistaken …

  with united love to all your dear family I remain sincerely yours Mary Robinson31

  In another letter she asked the renowned sculptor John Flaxman ‘if he could do her the Honor to arrange her Bust, as she is very earnestly requested, by many literary friends, to have one, completed’. She suggested that he could work from a mask of her face that she had modelled for him some years previously.32

  At the end of July the Morning Post announced that ‘Mrs ROBINSON means to pass the summer at her beautiful cottage in Surrey’, adding that her Lyrical Tales had gone to press.33 As for Tarleton, he was rapidly becoming a mere footnote in history. He had been dispatched to an obscure domestic posting in the Welsh mountains where, as the Morning Post derisively put it, ‘he will storm the heights of hitherto inaccessible rocks, and pursue his campaigns among the peaceful peasantry’.34

  WOMAN OF LETTERS

  LYRICAL TALES,

  BY

  MRS. MARY ROBINSON.

  LONDON:

  PRINTED FOR T. N. LONGMAN AND O. REES, PATERNOSTER-NOW,

  BY BIGGS AND CO. BRISTOL.

  1800.

  Title page of Mary’s last volume of poetry.

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘A Small but Brilliant Circle’

  Oh! Heavens! If a select society could be formed, – a little colony of mental powers, a world of talents, drawn into a small but brilliant circle, – what a splendid sunshine would it display!

  Mary Robinson to Jane Porter, September 1800

  I trust that a short period will effect a change in my mental system, which will be productive of repose: for the sorrows of sensibility, when they reach a certain climax, rise into fortitude, or soften into resignation.

  Mary Robinson, The False Friend

  After finishing Lyrical Tales, Mary retired to the small cottage ornée near Windsor that belonged to her daughter. According to Maria Elizabeth, she was happy for a time: ‘Rural occupation and amusement, quiet and pure air, appeared for a time to cheer her spirits, and renovate her shattered frame.’1 Mary planned to translate one of the epic German poems of the age, Friedrich Klopstock’s Messiah, intending to render it in blank verse, but her failing health persuaded her to abandon this idea.

  On 5 August 1800 Mary wrote from Englefield Cottage to her friend the novelist Jane Porter: ‘I should have done myself the pleasure of answering your letter before, had I not be [sic] very much indisposed. The warm weather has produced such languor in my spirits and constitution, that I am scarcely capable of holding my pen.’ She went on to enquire after the health of mutual friends, and then turned to literary business: ‘Tell your brother to read my first paper on “Society and manners in the Metropolis of England” page 35 of the Monthly Magazine, but desire him to substitute the word gust for gusto in column 5. page 37 – there are also some other press errors, which you will see.’ Her work as poetry editor of the Morning Post was continuing unabated: ‘I have transmitted your sweet lines on Mr Stocdale’s Poems, to Stuart, and they will, unquestionably be inserted. They are very charming!’ Then she concluded, ‘You must pardon me for this short letter for I am half dead with a nervous head-ache.’2

  The letter sets the tone for the final months of Mary’s life: continuing literary productivity and professionalism despite a constant struggle against ill health and discomfort in the exceptionally hot weather that lasted through the summer. The series of essays on ‘Society and Manners in the Metropolis of England’ represents her prose writing at its very best, while the attention to detail (witnessed by her annoyance over press errors) and her encouragement of fellow writers are the marks of her excellence as an editor.

  The letter to Miss Porter has a postscript: ‘Maria writes in all good wishes – and Mrs Fenwick presents her Compliments.’ Maria is, of course, her daughter, the constant companion who nursed her through her final months and who remained in the cottage at Englefield Green for many years after Mary’s death. Mrs Fenwick is Eliza Fenwick, author of a highly successful novel called Secrecy and a large number of books for children. Her marriage was on the rocks in 1800 and she and her daughter stayed with the Robinsons for nearly the whole month of August, the first in a stream of visitors who over the coming weeks turned the cottage into a community of – mostly female – literary minds.

  It is thanks to Eliza Fenwick that we have a vivid account of Englefield Cottage and its setting. She sent it to her friend, the feminist writer Mary Hays:

  Mrs Robinson’s Cottage stands aloof from the grander dwellings of Lady Shuldam, Lord Uxbridge and Mrs Freemantle. Its front windows look over St Ann’s Hill, the retreat of Mr Fox, and from the back we are sheltered by the tall trees of the forest. Mrs Robinson has displayed great taste in the fitting up of her cottage; the papers of the rooms in a particular degree are beautifully appropriated to the building and situation. The furniture is perhaps more ornamental than I should chuse for myself, but it is still elegant and quiet – nothing gaudy nor ill placed.3

  Like everyone who knew Mary in her final years, Eliza Fenwick was full of praise for her hostess’s intelligence and temperament: ‘I may congratulate myself on being the guest of a woman whose powers of pleasing, ever varied and graceful, are united to quick feeling and generosity of temper.’

  Windsor Great Park, where she had so often met the Prince, was immediately behind her cottage and Fox’s rural estate visible from its front window, so Mary could hardly forget her past. In late August and early September, she wrote several very long and exceptionally revealing letters. The first of them, to Jane Porter, began by contrasting the female friendships of her later, literary years with her experience of society ladies in her years of fame:

  Indeed I have in my tedious journey through life found so few estimable women, (particularly where I beheld handsome ones) that I not only admire but value you, excessively. If I do not enter into the true spirit of Friendship for my own Sex, it is because I have almost universally found that Sex unkind and hostile towards me, I have seen the most miserable and degrading, the most contemptible traits of false delicacy, glaring through the thin veil of artificial virtue. I have found those women the most fastidiously severe, whose own lives have been marked by private follies and assumed propriety. The women whom I have most admired, have been the least prone to condemn, while they have been themselves the most blameless. – Of this distinguished class I consider you.4

  She went on to say that she had spent the last few weeks confined with two unpleasant companions: one was a violently inflamed ankle that had given her considerable alarm (‘which thank Heaven has disappeared for I should not admire a mutilated leg’) and the other was a piece of literary hackwork – the task of translating a 200-page book from the German, Joseph Hager’s Picture of Palermo. She completed the job in ten days, testimony to her astonishing capacity for work despite her poor health. A happier writing task had been the completion of the Lyrical Tales.

  Jane Porter and her mother were invited to stay, Eliza Fenwick having departed. Mary said that her ‘intercourse with a few’, such as the Porters, had helped her to overcome the dislike that she once entertained for the society of her own sex. The letter closes with an honest and moving insight into its author’s condition:

  I find little benefit from the change of air. I work too hard, and too incessantly, at my pen, to recover rapidly: and, to say truly, I very little value life, therefore, perhaps, am neglectful of those attent
ions which are calculated to prolong it. My adored girl is an indefatigable nurse, – and in her I shall live – I trust, as I now exist by her affectionate solicitudes.

  She cannot afford to stop writing, even though work is killing her. ‘I am so accustomed to scribbling for Printers Devils, that I am now incapable of transcribing a single page for the perusals of Angels.’ As so often, she describes her daughter – who was busy doing the ‘Great Wash!!’ as Mary was writing the letter – as her only salvation.

  Robinson’s literary labours and her social life are brought further alive by a letter to fellow poet Samuel Jackson Pratt, written a few days later:

  My dear Friend

  I never wish to have any introductions to my own Poetry in the M[orning] P[ost]and therefore I thought of course that yours did not require it: the merit of your lines speaking for themselves … I continue my daily labours in the Post; all the Oberons, Tabithas, MRs and indeed most of the Poetry you see is mine.

  I remain secluded till November – will you come and pass a few days with us, this autumn? You must tell me what you think of my Lyrical Tales now printing by Longman and Reece. I am still tormented with ill health, but I have had my cottage perpetually full of visitors ever since I came to it; and some charming literary characters – authoresses – herein. I wish you would come and see us – I expect the Miss Porters, the beautiful sisters of the painter of the Seringapatam picture {with their mother}. I have had Mrs Fenwick, the elegant authoress of ‘Secresy’ and her daughter, here, this month past. Tomorrow I expect Godwin – and his philanthropic friend, Mr Marshall: they will only stay a day or two. …

  God bless you and farewell. Remember I have always a spare bed for my best friends, consequently we shall be delighted to see you. We have some thoughts of making an hasty journey to visit Coleridge, the Poet, and his amiable little wife, in Cumberland but health must decide this matter.5

  Another ‘authoress’ with whom she was corresponding at this time was the successful novelist Elizabeth Gunning. On the same day that Mary wrote to Pratt, she penned a letter to her, sending condolences on a family bereavement, inviting her to stay in order to take her mind off her loss, and speaking encouragingly of ‘your genius, your amiable and inestimable virtues’.6

  She also told Pratt of her frustration – the perennial complaint of authors – at the slowness of her publisher in getting her new book into print. She was unsure whether Lyrical Tales would make it onto the autumn (Michaelmas) list, or whether it would have to wait for Christmas:

  The man of Books has kept me in waiting, to correct his and my own errors these apes – I am not now assured whether I am to appear at the criticks board in the form of a Michaelmas goose, or under go the minutest mortification of becoming mince meat at the Christmas revels of our literary executioners!7

  The Lyrical Tales finally made it into print just before Christmas. The three-volume edition of Mary’s poetical works, with ‘its brilliant list of subscribers’, had been announced at the same time,8 but it did not appear until long after her death (and without the subscription list).

  The four-part essay in the Monthly Magazine on the ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc. etc. of the Metropolis of England’, mentioned in the letter to Jane Porter, reveals that Mary had genuine talent as an essayist, to add to her skills as poet, dramatist, and novelist. This extended essay, written in very poor health in the final months of her life, provides a valuable summation of many of her attitudes.

  The argument of the essay is that as ‘polished life’ takes its impression from the example of those of ‘exalted rank’, so the community at large takes its lead from the pursuits and pleasures ‘in the metropolis of a kingdom’. London is not only ‘the great emporium of commerce’ but also the ‘centre of attraction for the full exercise of talents, and the liberal display of all that can embellish the arts and sciences’. At the same time, though, ‘the very finest powers of intellect, and the proudest specimens of mental labour, have frequently appeared in the more contracted circles of provincial society. Bristol and Bath have each sent forth their sons and daughters of genius.’ The county of Devon alone may ‘boast the birth of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Coleridge, the exquisite poet; Wolcot, the unequalled satirist; Northcote, Cosway, Kendal, Tasker, Mrs Cowley, and many others of deserved celebrity’. Without dropping her own name, Mary thus placed herself amongst an extraordinary constellation of West Country talent (with all of whom she was personally acquainted).

  She then turned her attention to the stage, again reflecting on the great talents she had witnessed in her lifetime. The theatres were ‘the open schools of public manners, which exhibit at all times the touchstone of the public mind’. Dominating the age, as Garrick had dominated the previous generation, was ‘the brilliant wit of a Sheridan’, but at the same time ‘the theatres have, frequently, exhibited the most sublime efforts of the dramatic art, with advantages that are scarcely to be paralleled. The astonishing powers of a Kemble and a Siddons, the magical fascination of a Jordan, have been a source of wonder and delight to the discriminating of all nations who have visited the metropolis.’ The ‘British stage’, she rightly claimed, was at this time unparalleled anywhere in the world. She also observed that in time of war, the theatre was a valuable place of escape and national comfort.

  For women, another kind of comfort had come from changes in fashion:

  Dress has also been considerably improved by our intercourse with foreign nations. The women of this country now adopt a species of decoration at once easy and grateful. Nature seems to resume her empire, while art is hourly decaying. The deformities of stiffened stays, high heels, powder, whalebone petticoats, and unmeaning flounces of many coloured frippery, now yield to the simple elegance of cambric and muslin drapery: thus health is preserved by an unconstrained motion of the body; and beauty is ascertained by the unequivocal testimonies of symmetry and nature.

  Here Mary quietly took the credit she deserved for these innovations: ‘The females of England are considerably indebted to our most celebrated actresses for the revolution in dress.’

  She also suggested that she had lived through a golden age of painting (Reynolds above all, but also such rising stars as Flaxman and her friend Robert Ker Porter), of architecture, of improvements in public services (‘The streets of London are better paved and better lighted than those of any metropolis in Europe’), and of female accomplishment: ‘The women of England have, by their literary labours, reached an altitude of mental excellence, far above those of any other nation.’ But they have failed to work together as a sisterhood. The great female writers are ‘neglected, unsought, alienated from society’, each pursuing her fame independently: ‘How much is genius deceived when it seeks this single, this unconnected species of gratification! How powerful might such a phalanx become, were it to act in union of sentiment, and sympathy of feeling; and by a participation of public fame secure, to the end of time, the admiration of posterity.’

  As in A Letter to the Women of England, Mary argued that public neglect of artistic talent was a peculiarly English vice. The great writers, actors, actresses, and painters were, she said, excluded from high society: ‘these miserable discriminations are the offspring of the present age: the monsters of this island’. They ordered these things differently in France: ‘even in the days of despotism … Versailles had its female constellations’. In all this, Mary was clearly generalizing from her own personal experience, but given the fullness and the vicissitudes of the life she had lived, she had a right to do so. The essays, like the private letters of her last months, were written out of a yearning for community, for the kind of sisterhood that she would have experienced had the nation adopted her proposal of establishing a university for women.9

  She also began work on yet another novel. It survives only as a fragment entitled Jasper. It begins with a Madame de Stanheim perishing in a shipwreck. A sailor called Jasper rescues her 6-year-old son, struggles ashore and finds a hovel on a cl
iff top, in which there is a small packet of love letters and a lock of hair, with the words ‘Shipwrecked on the 1st September 1766’. The letters are addressed to Henry, signed Cecile. She is an 18-year-old girl living in India; by order of her father, she has been separated from Henry and he has been sent back to England. Jasper the sailor, accompanied by Madame de Stanheim’s child, returns to his native Cornwall, from where he has been exiled years before. When the child is feverish, he breaks into a party in a desperate bid to get the child a drink. He is promptly tied up in a stable, but a certain Lady Strickland shows pity and adopts the child. It turns out that she is Jasper’s long-lost love, destined for a richer man with the result that he was forced to leave home. The parallels between the story of Henry and Cecile and that of Jasper and Lady Strickland, together with the orphaned and adopted child, suggest that the different plots would have been brought together through some device involving double lives or mistaken identity, but only about a hundred pages were written and nothing is known of Mary’s larger intentions for the book. It is hard to see how the surviving fragment could have developed the political and feminist edge that characterized The Natural Daughter.

  In early September, there was an unfortunate accident. Mary described how she had suffered ‘a violent blow on the head, which very nearly put a period to my sensations, of every description’.10 She showed a wonderful capacity to laugh at her own misfortune: