Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom

This letter links several objects that I want to examine in the context of Mary Robinson’s burgeoning career as an author in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Robinson’s transformation of herself from washed-up actress to one of the most successful and prolific authors of the 1790s—“the English Sappho,” to invoke one of the soubriquets applied to her by the London press—may be said to reach critical mass with the publication of her Poems of 1791. My aim in this chapter is to examine that book along with two of its contents: the frontispiece portrait engraved by Thomas Burke from the1783 “Contemplation” portrait by Reynolds, the picture he refers to in the postscript to his letter; and the penultimate poem in the volume, Ainsi va le monde. In comparison to the other poet-celebrities that I consider in this study, Alexander Pope and Lord Byron, relatively little of Robinson’s correspondence survives, and the 1790 letter from Reynolds thus stands as critical documentary evidence pointing to Robinson’s involvement in the design of her forthcoming collection. The language of his letter suggests that the sixty-seven-year-old Reynolds, his eyesight failing and no longer “much in the habit of going out,” yet retains a vivid sense of the feints and parries required to refashion a public image in London’s commercial venues for art and literature—the necessity of flattering while forbearing to do so, for example, and the utility of the playful bribe composed in the high style.