Subjects
The Works of Mary Robinson
General Editor: William D Brewer
Volume Editors: Hester Davenport, Daniel Robinson, Sharon M Setzer, Julie A Shaffer, Orianne Smith and Dawn Vernooy-Epp
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 953 1: 234x156mm: £350.00/$625.00
978 1 85196 954 8: 234x156mm: £350.00/$625.00
Regularly the subject of cartoonists and satirical novelists, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1758–1800) achieved public notoriety as the mistress of the young Prince of Wales, later George IV. This eight-volume reset edition consolidates the recent shift in emphasis from her salacious life to her considerable literary achievements as both a novelist and poet. And recent interest in Robinson’s work is fast awarding her a place of importance within the canon of British Romantic Literature. Her association with key romantic figures such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the thematic comparisons between Robinson’s work and that of her contemporary Charlotte Smith, make her a serious figure for scholarly research.
With a keen eye for cultural and social critique her works expose the moral shortcomings of high society in Georgian England: the misogynistic treatment of women and the fetishistic obsession with wealth and social status receive particular attention. But more than social critique, these works identify Robinson as an avatar of subversive politics. Her well documented sympathy for the French Revolution evinces her political radicalism. And her unconventional treatment of gender and sexuality is emphasised by representations of transvestism and incest.
This critical edition presents all seven of Robinson’s novels for the first time. Also included is the unpublished play Nobody, a satirical afterpiece which sheds new light on Robinson’s wider oeuvre. The edition is important for scholars of Romantic Studies and Women’s Writing.
- The most complete collection of Robinson’s work ever published
- Full transcription of the perviously unpublished stage play Nobody
- New transcriptions from documents held at the Huntington Library, California
- Full editorial apparatus includes a substantial general introduction, a chronology of Robinson’s life, textual notes, and introductions specific to each novel
Contents
Part I
Volume 1
Editor: Dawn Vernooy-Epp
Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity (1792)
Set in fifteenth-century Spain, Vancenza is both a cautionary tale about the dangers of female credulity and a Gothic romance. The protagonist, Elvira, is a beautiful and naïve orphan of unknown parentage who uses her veil to bandage a wounded Prince. The Prince falls in love with her, and, after a series of misadventures, they become engaged. Before the wedding, however, she discovers a manuscript that reveals that she is the Prince’s half-sister. Horrified by the prospect of marrying her own brother, she expires. Written when the Gothic craze was at its height, Vancenza went into five editions by 1794. Robinson revisited the theme of incest in her penultimate novel, The False Friend.
The Widow, or a Picture of Modern Times (1794)
Robinson’s second novel, The Widow, is heavily influenced by Frances Burney’s Evelina. Like its predecessor, it is an epistolary social satire, and the sadistic treatment of simple country people by the idle landed gentry in The Widow recalls the abuse of lowborn octogenarian women who are compelled to race each other in Evelina. The protagonist, Julia St. Laurence, is a Philadelphian who has come to England in search of her English husband, who was separated from her when his regiment was transferred to another part of America. Although living in seclusion, she is harassed by an unprincipled rake and has numerous opportunities to observe the vices of English high society. The novel also features Lady Seymour, a frivolous and superficial pleasure seeker who is reformed into a virtuous wife. The second-last chapter of The Widow contains a panegyric to Robinson’s former lover, the Prince of Wales.
Volume 2
Editor: Sharon M Setzer
Angelina; A Novel (1796)
Angelina received a rave review from Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Robinson met in 1796, and it echoes many of the ideas that Wollstonecraft formulated in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In their letters, Robinson’s characters critique male gallantry, denounce financially and socially advantageous marriages that legally prostitute women, expatiate on the dangers of excessive sensibility, observe that women can be sexually promiscuous as long as they preserve the reputation for chastity, and compare oppressed women to African slaves. Sir Edward Clarendon, the heroine’s father, is both a West Indian slave owner and a tyrannical parent who attempts to sell his daughter to an aristocrat to improve his family’s social standing. This novel suggests that filial disobedience can in some cases be a virtue.
Volume 3
Editor: Orianne Smith
Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (1796)
Heavily influenced by Ann Radcliffe’s romances, Hubert de Sevrac chronicles the misadventures of an aristocratic émigré family who flees from revolutionary France to Gothic Italy. Hubert is both a male and female bildungsroman in which the title-character, a French Marquis, eventually abandons the chivalric, elitist ideology of the old regime and assumes a new identity as an expatriate and family man, and his politically enlightened daughter learns the folly of religious superstitions. Writing during a period of anti-revolutionary hysteria in England, Robinson boldly (and perhaps recklessly) eulogizes the storming of the Bastille in the novel’s third and final volume.
Volume 4
Editor: Daniel Robinson
Poems
Robinson’s contemporaries dubbed her 'the English Sappho'. An ardent admirer of her poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared her 'a woman of undoubted Genius', and he praised the meter of her poem 'The Haunted Beach' in a letter to his fellow poet Robert Southey: 'ay! that Woman has an Ear'. A prolific poet, she wrote Della Cruscan verse under a variety of pseudonyms, political and satirical poems, a long sonnet sequence entitled Sappho and Phaon (1796), and a volume entitled Lyrical Tales (1800) that reflects the influence of Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). Robinson often reprinted her poems, which appeared in variant forms in newspapers, her novels, and in volumes of poetry. This collection will be the first complete and scholarly edition of Robinson’s poetry ever published and will include periodical verse that did not appear in the posthumous 1806 Poetical Works.
Part II
Volume 5
Editor: William D Brewer
Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story (1797)
For the first three volumes of Walsingham, Sir Sidney Aubrey appears to be the title-character’s male rival, 'the seducer' of the woman he loves, but near the end of the fourth and final volume the protagonist abruptly learns that Sir Sidney is a woman. Although Sidney’s position as a rich male baronet gives her freedoms denied late eighteenth-century women, her closeted sexual identity becomes a burden that nearly destroys her. The novel suggests that gender is performative and, through its portrait of an emotionally volatile 'pupil of nature' who (unwittingly) fights a duel with one woman and seduces and ultimately destroys another, critiques the eighteenth-century valorization of the man of feeling.
Volume 6
Editor: Julie A Shaffer
The False Friend: A Domestic Story (1799)
In The False Friend Robinson explores two themes that recur throughout her writings: incest and illegitimacy. The novel focuses on the quest of the orphaned Gertrude St. Leger to discover her parentage and form an identity in a corrupt society swarming with manipulative, treacherous, and predatory men (false friends). Her mysterious and mercurial guardian, Lord Denmore, fails to tell his ward that she is his daughter, the product of an adulterous love affair, and she becomes infatuated with him, not realizing that her passion for him is incestuous. Gertrude’s loss of her maternal genealogy, symbolized by the erasure of her dead mother’s portrait and her accidental fragmentation of Sappho’s bust (for which her mother was the model), stunts her emotional and social development. The mistakes of her parents doom the innocent and chronically depressed heroine of this darkly pessimistic novel.
Volume 7
Editor: Hester Davenport
The Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel (1799)
Set in England and revolutionary France, The Natural Daughter invites comparisons between male oppressors of women in England and the fanatical Jacobins Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre, who are presented as womanizing terrorists. The heroine, Martha Morley, is vilified and ostracized by a hypocritically moralistic society for befriending an abandoned infant, who is immediately assumed to be her natural, or illegitimate, daughter. Repudiated by her dysfunctional husband and family, she desperately seeks to make her living, as Robinson did, as an actress and author. In this novel, Robinson frequently shifts back and forth from scenes of Gothic terror and mystery to satirical portrayals of the boorish nouveau riche merchant class.
Memoirs of Mrs Mary Robinson
This is the first republication of the Memoirs which follows Robinson's original manuscript rather than the version published later by her daughter Maria Robinson. Much material was cut or altered for publication and this edition lists all textual variants.
Letters from Mary Robinson
The few extant letters from Mary Robinson are published here.
Volume 8
Editors: William Brewer and Sharon M Setzer
Impartial Reflections of the Present Situation of the Queen of France (1791)
Nobody, a Comedy in Two Acts (performed 1794)
Robinson’s dramatic afterpiece Nobody is an unpublished satire on female gamesters. One of the characters in Walsingham, Lady Amaranth, describes how members of London high society can close down plays they dislike by disrupting them. This was the fate that befell Nobody, which was withdrawn after the Whig elite instructed their servants to drown out the performances with applauses and hisses. The comedy provides an illuminating context for the sections of Walsingham that lampoon 'the tribunal of literary judgment' that determined the success or failure of authors in late eighteenth-century London.
The Sicilian Lover (1796)
A Letter to the Women of England (1799)
The Sylphid Essays (October 1799 – February 1800, Morning Post)
Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England (1800, Monthly Magazine)
“Anecdotes” of Duke de Lauzun, Duke of Chartres, and Marie Antoinette (1800, Monthly Magazine)
Jasper (1801)
Recalling her best-known poem, “The Haunted Beach,” Robinson’s unfinished novel Jasper begins with a shipwreck. The title-character, a sailor, rescues a six-year-old boy whose mother has drowned and then discovers a sheaf of love letters from a woman living in India who has been separated from her beloved by her tyrannical father. Jasper travels to Cornwall with the orphaned boy and, when the child falls ill, breaks into an upper-class gathering to secure a drink for his charge. He is imprisoned in a stable, but a woman he once loved, now Lady Strickland, adopts the child. It appears that Robinson intended to link the two stories of unrequited passion. The fragment addresses themes that she frequently explores in her other works: parental oppression, an orphan’s uncertain origins, and social injustice.