by Paula Byrne
5 All Nobody quotations from Larpent manuscript, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
6 Memoirs, p. 143.
7 Prologue and epilogue were published in the London Chronicle, 1 Dec. 1794.
8 Memoirs, p. 143.
9 The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 5, vol. iii, ed. C. B. Hogan (Carbondale, Ill., 1968), p. 1707.
10 Quoted Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan’s Profession (London, 1994), p. 146.
11 London Chronicle, 1 Dec. 1794.
12 London Chronicle, 1 Dec. 1794.
13 London Chronicle, 2 Dec. 1794; Morning Post, 8 Dec. 1794.
14 London Chronicle, 9 Dec. 1794.
15 ‘January, 1795’, Morning Post, 29 Jan. 1795.
16 Letter of 4 July 1795, in Collection of Autograph Letters, v, p. 288.
17 Oracle, 4 Sept. 1795.
18 Oracle, 16 Oct. 1795.
19 Angelina, i, pp. 55, 56, 155; ii, pp. 71–2.
20 Oracle, 23 Jan. 1796; Critical Review, 16 (1796), p. 397.
21 Critical Review, 16 (1796), p. 398.
22 Monthly Mirror, 1 (1795–6), p. 290.
23 Angelina, i, p. 86.
24 Angelina, i, pp. 204, 219.
25 Angelina, ii, pp. 79–80.
26 Angelina, ii, p. 49; iii, p. 102.
27 Analytical Review, 23 (1796), pp. 293–4.
28 Angelina, i, pp. 56, 84.
29 Preface to Poetical Works (1806).
30 Printed among ‘Tributary Poems’ in Poetical Works (1806).
31 See Jan Fergus and J. F. Thaddeus, ‘Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790–1820’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17 (1987), pp. 191–207.
32 The Sicilian Lover: a Tragedy in Five Acts (1796), 2. 3; 3. 1.
33 Monthly Review, 19 (1796), p. 312.
34 Oracle, 27 Aug. 1796. The Widow was reissued in Leipzig with the new title Julia St Lawrence.
35 Hawkins, Memoirs, ii, p. 34.
CHAPTER 22
1 C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London, 1876), i, p. 154.
2 End of Bk 2nd, Poetical Works (1824 reprint), p. 176. This was one of Mary’s last poems, testimony to the endurance of her Godwinianism.
3 Paul, Godwin, i, p. 162.
4 Godwin’s diary is now in the Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
5 Preface to Sappho and Phaon, a series of legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, & Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess (1796).
6 ‘To the Reader’, in Sappho and Phaon.
7 Sonnet IV, in Sappho and Phaon.
8 Sonnet XIII, in Sappho and Phaon.
9 ‘Anthony Pasquin’ (John Williams), The New Brighton Guide (London, 1796), p. 53.
10 Hubert de Sevrac: A Romance of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols (1796), i, p. 14.
11 Mary Wollstonecraft’s phrase, in her review of the novel.
12 Walsingham, ed. Shaffer, p. 218.
13 Critical Review, 23 (1798), p. 472.
14 Analytical Review, 25 (1797), p. 523.
15 Oracle, 12 Dec. 1796.
16 Monthly Magazine, 4 (1797), p. 121.
17 Wollstonecraft to Godwin, 12 Dec. 1796, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (London, 2003), p. 383.
18 Wollstonecraft to Godwin, 13 Dec. 1796, Letters, pp. 383–4.
19 Wollstonecraft to Hays, Jan. 1797, Letters, p. 393.
20 Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 387.
21 Fleetwood (1805), in Collected Novels of William Godwin, vol. v, ed. Pamela Clemit (London, 1992), pp. 220–1.
22 Oracle, 30 May 1797.
23 The Oracle records her departure from London on 6 April and has her still confined on the Bath road on 8 May.
24 ‘Lines written on a sick-bed, 1797’.
25 Oracle, 17 Oct. 1797.
26 Walsingham, ed. Shaffer, p. 119.
27 Walsingham, ed. Shaffer, p. 129.
28 Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 (1798), pp. 160–4.
29 T. J. Mathias, Pursuits of Literature (9th edn, revised, Dublin, 1799), p. 58.
30 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London, 1798), p. 16.
31 Polwhele, Unsex’d Females, p. 17n.
32 Walsingham, ed. Shaffer, p. 216.
33 Telegraph, 11 Feb. 1797.
34 Quoted Essays on his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3 vols (Princeton and London, 1978), i, p. lxvii.
35 See obituary of Stuart, Gentleman’s Magazine, NS 28 (1847), pp. 322–4.
36 Quoted Coleridge, Essays on his Times, i, p. lxxii.
37 Morning Post, 17 Apr. 1798.
38 This was Coleridge’s retainer for weekly contributions of ‘verses or political essays’. Given her greater prominence, Robinson may well have been in a position to hold out for more.
39 See Robert Woof, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’, Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), pp. 149–89.
40 Memoirs, p. 146.
41 Morning Post, 7 Dec. 1797.
42 Morning Post, 9 Jan. 1798.
43 Morning Post, 3 Jan. 1798.
44 Walsingham, ed. Shaffer, pp. 59–60; Morning Post, 26 Dec. 1797.
45 Morning Post, 18 Jan. 1798.
46 Oracle, 25 Jan. 1798.
47 Morning Post, 20 Jan. 1798.
48 Morning Post, 28 Feb. 1798.
49 Morning Post, 19 May 1798.
50 Morning Post, 23 Apr. 1798.
51 Oracle, 22 May; Morning Post, 30 May 1798.
52 Morning Post, 21 June 1798.
53 Oracle, 7, 28 Apr.; Morning Post, 15 May 1798.
54 Morning Post, 2 May 1798.
CHAPTER 23
1 Morning Post, 18 Feb. 1799.
2 Morning Post, 22 Feb.; Oracle, 28 Feb. 1799.
3 Monthly Magazine, 7 (1799), p. 541; Analytical Review, NS 1 (1799), p. 209.
4 The False Friend, a Domestic Story, 4 vols (1799), i, p. 158.
5 The False Friend, i, p. 42; ii, p. 177.
6 The False Friend, ii, p. 78.
7 Monthly Mirror, 7 (1799), p. 166.
8 The False Friend, iv, pp. 91–2.
9 The False Friend, ii, p. 181; iii, p. 115.
10 Anti-Jacobin Review, 3 (1799), p. 39.
11 The False Friend, ii, pp. 284, 198.
12 The False Friend, ii, pp. 77–8.
13 Gentleman’s Magazine, Apr. 1799, p. 311, reviewing A Letter to the Women of England.
14 A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, ed. Sharon Setzer (Peterborough, Ont., 2003), pp. 74, 72, 69–70.
15 Letter to the Women, p. 43.
16 Letter to the Women, pp. 48–9.
17 Letter to the Women, p. 65.
18 Letter to the Women, p. 83.
19 Letter to the Women, p. 87.
20 Anti-Jacobin Review, 3 (1799), pp. 144–5.
21 Monthly Mirror, Mar. 1799, p. 133.
22 Morning Post, 30 July 1799.
23 Bass, The Green Dragoon, p. 392. The claim is typical of Bass’s absurdly Tarleton-centred account of everything about Mary.
24 ‘The heroine, a decidedly flippant female, apparently of the Wollstonecraft school’: British Critic, 16 (1800), p. 327; ‘We regret that the author will not confine her labours to poetry’: European Magazine, 37 (1800), p. 138.
25 This point is made by Sharon Setzer in her excellent introduction to the novel, p. 28.
26 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, p. 180.
27 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, pp. 208–10.
28 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, p. 218.
29 Morning Post, 1, 7 June 1799.
30 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, pp. 218–19.
31 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, p. 221.
32 Natural Daughter, ed. Setzer, p. 255.
CHAPTER 24
1 Morning Post, 13 Dec. 1799; Memoirs, p. 144.
2 Memoirs, p. 145.
3 Morning Post,
7 Aug. 1799.
4 Preface to Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 2nd edn (1799).
5 All these examples from Morning Post, Jan. 1800.
6 Morning Post, 2 Jan. 1800.
7 To John Sewell, bookseller, Cornhill, British Library Add. MS 78689, fol. 9. An identical letter, to an unidentified publisher, survives in the Garrick Club Library.
8 To Southey, 25 Jan. 1800, Collected Letters of Coleridge, i, pp. 562–3.
9 28 Feb. 1800, Collected Letters of Coleridge, i, pp. 575–6.
10 Morning Post, 26 Feb. 1800.
11 Morning Post, 20 Mar., 3 Mar., 7 Mar. 1800.
12 Before her death Mary revised the Sylphid essays for publication in book form; Maria Elizabeth included them among the ‘posthumous pieces’ published in 1801 with the Memoirs. Quotations from pp. 4, 19, 22, 23–4, 36.
13 John Fyvie, Comedy Queens of the Georgian Era (London, 1906), p. 275.
14 Letter to Jane Porter, 27 Aug. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2295.
15 Morning Post, 2 Apr. 1800.
16 Letter of 17 June 1800, Garrick Club Library.
17 ‘The Lascar’, in Selected Poems, ed. Pascoe, p. 198. This volume helpfully includes all the poems from Lyrical Tales.
18 Stuart Curran, in his important essay, ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context’, in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, eds Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 17–35 (p. 22).
19 Morning Post, 15 Apr. 1800.
20 See her biographical sketch of Lauzun and ‘Sappho – To the Earl of Moira’, Morning Post, 3 July 1800.
21 Morning Post, 19 Apr. 1800.
22 23 Apr. 1800, printed in Memoirs, pp. 148–9.
23 Letter of Apr. 1800, Montagu MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
24 Repr. in The Wild Wreath ed. Mary E. Robinson (1804), as ‘A receipt [i.e. recipe] for modern love’.
25 Robinson to Godwin, 30 May 1800, Bodleian Library, Abinger Deposit, c. 810/2.
26 Back in April 1797 she had written to thank him for some verses and a picture, ‘both of which she admires extremely’, and rearranging a social call – ‘Mrs Robinson would have called today had not the weather proved so unfavourable’ (Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2289).
27 To R. K. Porter, 3 July 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2450.
28 Public Characters of 1800–1801 (1801), p. 179.
29 Public Characters of 1800–1801, pp. 333–4. When the volume was reprinted some time later, after her death, the original eight-page essay on Mary was replaced by a twenty-page condensation of her Memoirs.
30 Public Characters of 1800–1801, pp. 336–41.
31 Probably to Jane Porter, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2294.
32 Robinson to Flaxman, 18 July 1800, British Library Add. MS 39781, fol. 27.
33 Morning Post, 26 July 1800.
34 Morning Post, 2 Aug. 1800.
CHAPTER 25
1 Memoirs, p. 149.
2 Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2290.
3 Eliza Fenwick, Fate of the Fenwicks: Letters to Mary Hays (1798–1828), ed. A. F. Wedd (London, 1927), p. 10.
4 27 Aug. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2295.
5 31 Aug. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2294.
6 31 Aug. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2291.
7 Robinson to Pratt, MS in Harvard Theatre Collection, TS940.6, 1, p. 89.
8 Monthly Magazine, Aug. 1800, p. 48, announcing both collections as forthcoming in the winter; Dec. 1800, p. 450, announcing publication of Lyrical Tales. The November magazine announced publication of the Hager translation.
9 ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, etc. etc. of the Metropolis of England’, Monthly Magazine, 10 (1800), pp. 35–8 (Aug.), 138–40 (Sept., signed MR), 218–22 (Oct.), 305–6 (Nov., signed MR).
10 11 Sept. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2292.
11 Robinson to James Marshall, 10 Sept. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b. 215/2.
12 Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2292.
13 To Jane Porter, 15 Oct. 1800, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2293.
14 Robinson to Godwin, 16 Aug. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, c. 8101/2.
15 Robinson to Godwin, 24 Aug. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b. 215/2.
16 Robinson to Godwin, 28 Aug. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b. 215/2.
17 Robinson to Godwin, 2 Sept. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, c. 507.
18 Robinson to Marshall, 10 Sept. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b. 215/2.
19 Robinson to Godwin, 10 Oct. 1800, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, c. 8101/2.
20 Memoirs, p. 149.
21 Morning Post, 30 Aug. 1800.
22 Every-Day Book (1827), pp. 1174–5.
23 Morning Post, 3 Oct. 1800.
24 Coleridge to Stuart, 7 Oct. 1800, Collected Letters of Coleridge, i, p. 629.
25 Morning Post, 14 Oct. 1800.
26 Morning Post, 17 Oct. 1800. A variant text was published in Mary’s posthumous Poetical Works, including such lines as ‘O hills! made sacred by thy parent’s song!’
27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London, 1993), p. 189.
28 Quoted from text in 1806 Poetical Works. 1801 text repr. in Levy, ‘Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Kubla Khan, pp. 165–6.
29 Coleridge, Poems, ed. Beer, p. 326.
30 Coleridge to Poole, Collected Letters of Coleridge, ii, p. 669.
31 Morning Post, 18 Dec. 1800.
32 18 Dec. 1800, repr. in Memoirs, with posthumous pieces, 4 vols (London, 1801), iv, p. 189.
33 Memoirs, p. 150.
34 Memoirs, p. 150.
35 Memoirs, p. 151.
36 Memoirs, p. 152. Maria Elizabeth may, of course, be indulging in a little literary embroidery of the deathbed sequence.
EPILOGUE
1 Maria Elizabeth Robinson to Godwin, 8 Jan. 1801, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b.215/1.
2 Undated letter to Godwin, Abinger Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, b.214/3.
3 Maria Elizabeth Robinson to Cadell and Davies, 11 June 1804 (private collection).
4 Jane Porter’s Manuscript Diary, 1801, Folger Shakespeare Library, Mb. 15, fols. 2–3, referring to her memoir, ‘Character of the Late Mrs Robinson, who is usually stiled the British Sappho, extracted from a letter to a lady’.
5 The Royal Legend. A Tale (1808), p. 34.
6 Pierce Egan, The Mistress of Royalty; or, the Loves of Florizel and Perdita (1814), pp. 124–42.
7 Coleridge to Maria Elizabeth Robinson, 27 Dec. 1802, Collected Letters of Coleridge, ii, p. 904.
8 Collected Letters of Coleridge, ii, pp. 905–6.
9 Windsor, Slough and Eton Express, 27 Aug. 1971.
10 See Selected Poems, ed. Pascoe, p. 35n.
11 Fox to Mary Benwell, preserved in Sheridan papers; see Walter Sichel, Sheridan, 2 vols (London, 1909), ii, p. 52.
12 His fascinating correspondence with her governess is preserved in the Surrey Records Office (3677/3/28–154).
13 In Walsingham as ‘Penelope’s Epitaph’ (ed. Shaffer, p. 56). Both this poem and Pratt’s were printed in the Memoirs (pp. 153–4).
APPENDIX
1 Memoirs, p. 42. A detail inserted in the manuscript of the Memoirs at a late stage.
2 Jane Porter, ‘Character of the late Mrs Robinson’, unpublished manuscript, Pforzheimer Misc. MS 2296.
3 Autograph manuscript of ‘Memoirs’, fol. 4, in a private collection.
4 Morning Herald, 29 June 1781.
PRAISE
From the reviews of Perdita:
‘Mary Robinson, scandalous darling of the 18th-century stage and letters, is given a welcome rebirth. A full-scale literary biography … a fitting tribute to her’
Observer
‘Enthralling and perceptive … A fine biographer has conjured up a dazzling personality and brought her, laughing, back to life’
‘Robinson’s is a life that bears the retelling. She cuts a figure in the history of celebrity culture and in literary history. Paula Byrne’s full-scale biography is scholarly, lively and important’
Daily Telegraph
‘She was, many believed, the most beautiful woman in England. And one of the most fascinating … small wonder that Perdita has been dubbed the Madonna of the eighteenth century. A scholarly, entertaining and well-written book’
ADAM SISMAN, Literary Review
‘We seem to have an insatiable appetite for biographies of 18th-century women … a superbly researched and narrated life of a woman whose capacity for self-transformation, when combined with beauty, talent, wit and passion suggest that she may be the most interesting of them all’
MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Sunday Times
‘Engaging … Here was a woman who entertained Wordsworth, Coleridge, and William Godwin, and of whom Coleridge would write “her work was good, bad and indifferent … but full and overflowing”’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Robinson’s story – particularly the early, dazzling part – makes highly enjoyable entertainment’
New Statesman
OTHER WORKS
Also by Paula Byrne
Jane Austen and the Theatre
COPYRIGHT
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith,
London W6 8JB
www.harperperennial.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
FOURTH EDITION
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Paula Byrne 2004
PS Section © Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘Celebrity’ by Paula Byrne © Paula Byrne 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Paula Byrne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work