[In the following essay, Lee considers the collection of verses by notable Romantic poets, The Wild Wreath, edited by Maria Elizabeth Robinson, for the significance of Mary Robinson's posthumous contributions, which dominate the volume and represent Robinson's daughter's attempt to ensure her mother's place in the Romantic canon.]

At the center of Mary Robinson's poem “The Foster-Child” is an abandoned boy who spends his time “on the mossy bank, alone,” “weaving a poison'd wreath” and “chaunt[ing] a strain of woe.” The foster-boy lives life on the edge, like many of Robinson's poetic characters: a maid trapped in a black tower, a gambler with a ruined life, a suicidal Negro girl, an outcast lascar.¹ But the foster-child is not just a social outcast: since he spends most of his lonely hours weaving wreaths, playing with potions, and chanting poems, he is a familiar Romantic figure for the artist whose exiled social status makes the “wreath” of his or her poetry all the more powerful, or “poison'd.” Represented as an “elfin ghost,” without origin or destination, as having a mysterious past, an unstable present, and an uncertain future, as one who exists precisely because of his ambiguous status, the foster-child invites us to consider how the socially dead and insubstantial can materialize through the creative act. For when Robinson wrote this poem in 1800, she herself was dying both physically and socially. “The Foster-Child” gestures toward a resurrection, not of a ghost, but of Robinson, the haunting dead author.

It is no accident that “The Foster-Child” is the opening poem in the posthumous collection of verses The Wild Wreath. The volume, issued in 1804 by publisher Richard Phillips, four years after Robinson's death, was collected and edited by Robinson's only surviving daughter, Maria Elizabeth. Although The Wild Wreath contains poems by Romantic literary luminaries like Robert Merry, M. G. Lewis, Robert Southey, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, and Anna Seward, the editor's mother Mary Robinson is clearly the collection's focal point. She dominates the volume by her position as author of the opening poem and by sheer weight, more than half the poems being hers. The Wild Wreath thus demonstrates Maria Elizabeth Robinson's keen awareness both of how to create an enduring or canonical reputation and of the important role the poetic collection played in the making of such a reputation. The Wild Wreath focuses intensively on Robinson and so “packages” her disillusionment in order to insure her permanence.

I. BODY LANGUAGE

On December 10, 1776, Mary Robinson became a public body. She made her acting debut at eighteen as Juliet in David Garrick's Drury Lane Theatre and was rewarded with favorable reviews in London papers. These reviews focused almost exclusively on her physical attributes. One noted, for instance, that “her voice [is] harmonious,” and “her features, when properly animated, are striking and expressive.”² It was on this occasion that the Morning Post began a love affair with Robinson that lasted until her death. The Post reported, “There has not been a lady on this, or any other stage, for some seasons, who promises to make so capital an actress.”³ This was an idyllic moment in Robinson's otherwise painful life, so it is no wonder that when writing her memoirs, on her death-bed twenty-four years later, she emphasized her inaugural leap into the public arena. Since Robinson died before she finished her memoirs, it is impossible to say how far she would have shifted her persona away from her acting career toward her poetic career. Such a strategy was left to the designs of Maria Elizabeth, who finished the narrative with deliberate attention to Robinson's growing poetic reputation and decaying body.⁴

Precisely what disease Robinson suffered from remains a mystery. At twenty-three, she took sick with “rheumatic fever” at the end of her long affair with a military man, Banastre Tarleton. According to some stories, Robinson was pregnant with Tarleton's child and had a miscarriage while chasing her deserting lover as he left England for France. Whatever the cause, in the Preface to Robinson's Poetical Works (1806), Maria Elizabeth uses the illness to recast her mother's troubling public image as mistress to various public men. Her description of Robinson's malady in effect shrinks the body from “lovely woman” to pitiable child. Her illness, writes Maria Elizabeth, “reduced the frame of this lovely and unfortunate woman to the feebleness of an infant, which obliged her to be carried in the arms of her attendants to the last moment of her life!” (I:x-xi). Maria Elizabeth takes pains to cast Robinson as a feeble invalid, a role that to some degree would restore respectability and possibly even hint that her illness was adequate penance for her previous promiscuity.

By contrast, Robinson's alluring body during her stage career appears with special force throughout her own section of Memoirs (Robinson, Perdita), which culminates in a dizzying list of her acting roles: Ophelia, Viola, Jacintha, Fidelia, Rosalind, Oriana, Octavia, Julia, Palmira, Alinda, Juliet, Imogen, Lady Macbeth, Perdita, Cordelia, Emily, Miss Richley, Statira, and Amanda, among others. In the autobiographical image Robinson represents, acting is her life's theme. As a woman with a constantly changing face, she could be newly born each night yet always at the center of “a circle of the most respectable and partial friends” (Perdita 93). And maintaining a circle—both a broad circle of society and an intimate group of friends—was always important to Robinson's self-definition.

In this public forum Robinson's beautiful, chameleonic body immediately became marketable. She fended off a trail of male suitors who held “forth the temptations of fortunes” in exchange for sexual and social favors alike (Perdita 93). Though Robinson published several books of poetry during this period of her life, it was her physical body to which the public clung. The Monthly Review said of her poem “Captivity” (published in 1777 and based on a ten-month imprisonment with her soldiering husband), “Two reasons preclude criticism here. The poems are the production of a lady: and that lady is unhappy.”⁵ Ironically, this “lady” became the subject of other people's productions. Robinson was portrayed by accomplished painters of the day, namely George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, and Joshua Reynolds, all of whom variously idealize her sexuality. Reynolds, for example, pictures her with creamy-white skin and breasts and silken hair, demurely looking down and away from the public gaze even as she attracts it.⁶

In 1779, Robinson was finally paid to end a legendary one-year affair with the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Yet even after her affair with the Prince of Wales, details of her life were held up for public consumption. As Judith Pascoe notes, “a large number of caricatures” appeared in contemporary newspapers and cartoons picturing Robinson “riding in various kinds of coaches, accompanied by one or several of the public men with whom she was associated” (“Spectacular” 167). Her body became synonymous with flagrant sexuality and thus with that of a healthy woman in her prime, whose feminine robustness threatened to weaken the nation as she infiltrated Britain's political infrastructure through its men. She made inroads into the monarchy through her connection with the Prince of Wales, into the government through Charles James Fox, and into the military through her marriage to Colonel Banastre Tarleton.

After Robinson's death, Maria Elizabeth described her as a woman who “attracted the attention of the public” but whose “virtues” were “little known” (Perdita 108). In order to redefine Robinson as virtuous instead of promiscuous, Maria Elizabeth weakened, then erased, the public body Robinson had flaunted throughout her early years and even throughout the first part of her memoirs. The climactic episode in Maria Elizabeth's account of the ailing Robinson occurs when two “ruffian-looking men” “forced themselves into the chamber of an almost expiring woman” and “with a barbarous and unmanly sneer” remarked, “‘Who, to see the lady they were now speaking to, could believe that she had once been called the beautiful Mrs Robinson?’” (145). This incident, which bears remarkable resemblance to Burke's account of the “ruffians and assassins” who burst into the boudoir of the defenseless Marie Antoinette at the height of the revolution, does more than emphasize Robinson's weakness (164). With the “beautiful” Robinson effectively disembodied from her biographical portrait, the poetic Robinson had room to emerge. In Perdita, the “intruder” incident is immediately followed by a “beautiful and affecting” poem Robinson wrote before her death, “Ode to Spring” (146). The poem sprawls out full and healthy across the page, a thick, sinewy patch, “Radiant and unexhausted” (line 49), “life-glowing,” “vivid” and “warm” (lines 1-2). It substitutes a textual body for Robinson's wasting physical body, leading readers on a path away from the bodily and to the lyrical Robinson. The poem, and others like it that fill the last pages of the memoirs, turn Robinson's biography into an advertisement for her poetic reputation and turn readers to Robinson's increasing poetic presence, artfully embodied in The Wild Wreath.

II. SHADOW WRITING

In establishing a poetically posthumous Mary Robinson, her daughter Maria Elizabeth probably took biographical cues from Robinson herself. In a letter to Godwin shortly before her death, Robinson had set up a paradox between bodily decay and inward strength. And this paradox is set against a “circle of society.” Robinson sees the weaknesses of the body actually producing a lively, “independent, resentful energy”:

In the broad circle of society, it is frequently convenient … to assume a character, rather than to sustain one. I am a living proof that such artifice is advantageous and that to be ingenuous is to insure a long succession of pains and disappointments. Had I been an artificial creature—I might have had wealth and vulgar estimation, a creature to be envied! But the impetuosity of my temper; the irritability of my feelings;—the proud, independent, resentful energy of my soul, placed a barrier between me and fortune, which has thrown a gloom on every hour of my existence. So much for Self.⁷

Robinson insisted she would “rather be anything, than a miserable mortal who can patiently endure” criticism. For Robinson, the “Self” had not dissolved into an artifice or a character, nor had it melded with the broad social circle that ridiculed her.

Rejecting for her mother the fickle and transitory “broad circle of society,” Maria Elizabeth used The Wild Wreath to build a more select but enduring poetic circle. The circle would be based on the poetic connections Robinson herself had established among writers like Southey, Coleridge, M. G. Lewis, and Robert Merry. This action seems to have been based upon a pre-death agreement between mother and daughter. The letters between Robinson and Godwin indicate that her place among the poetic circles of the day was on her mind. “You tell me that I have ‘literary Fame.’ How comes it then, that I am abused, neglected,—unhonoured—unrewarded,” she asks Godwin.⁸ At exactly the same time, Maria Elizabeth reports being duty-bound to honor Robinson's literary life after her death. Maria Elizabeth, who completed and edited Robinson's memoirs, presents her mother as a woman eager for posthumous publication. In the days before the death, Robinson “collected and arranged her poetic works” and gathered her memoirs, “which she bound her daughter, by a solemn adjuration, to publish for her subscribers” (150). Coming before her readers as a writer and poet was “her last desire” (150).

Yet Robinson's death-bed desire for her writing was ironically positioned between writerly presence and social retreat. Her wish to exhibit her unpublished writing coincided paradoxically with a desire for social seclusion imposed by her declining health and financial instability. She wrote to Godwin in September of 1800 how she was “hourly indulging a misanthropic spirit which takes from me love of society,” how she would “in a very short time” “seclude myself wholly—from the world, a solitary shadow of my former self.”⁹ In fact, because of her illness and her circumstances, Robinson may have been a mere shadow of her former self at this time. Even so, her letters to Godwin and her reported conversations with Maria Elizabeth suggest that a literary self would actually emerge as a “shadow.” Robinson insisted on posthumous publication and thereby saw herself as maintaining power precisely by being not-there.

Other Romantic authors also used sickness and disability as an occasion for powerful poetry. Coleridge's “This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison” operates on just this sort of logic. Though he is immobile through injury, he moves himself psychologically and poetically, until he stands “silent with swimming sense,” gazing “on the wide landscape” where “all doth seem / Less gross than bodily” (lines 39-41). Coleridge can escape the physicality of his injury and move through the “Almighty Spirit” (43). Similarly Dorothy Wordsworth was one of many women poets to capture the same sentiment in “Thoughts on my Sickbed,” where she “felt a power … controlling weakness, languor, pain,” and which becomes in effect emotion recollected in tranquillity (ll. 41-42):

No prisoner in this lonely room
I saw the green banks of the Wye,
No need of motion or of strength
Or even the breathing air,
I thought of nature's loveliest scenes,
And with memory I was there.

(ll. 45-52)

In Robinson's own “Lines Written on a Sickbed” (1797), there is little comfort to be had in the confinement of pain. She belligerently refuses to find solace in sickness. Each stanza in the poem brings on a new wave of despair, a “sullen gloom” overwhelming the “mind” and “dark weeds” feasting on the “soul,” “with Mem'ry's thorns entwined” (ll. 16-20). Robinson does sound one hopeful note in her “Sickbed” poem, and this is her reference to the ghostly “Hereafter” (l. 35).

Maria Elizabeth, however, constructs Robinson as a poet who finds fertility in her illness, as one whose imaginings pour forth from ghostly dreams, from mind-crushing sicknesses, from mysterious abysses that terrify male on-lookers. Though confined to her bed and “prohibited by her physician … from committing her thoughts to paper” (Perdita 138), Robinson undergoes a Coleridgean dream and awakes to a spectacular poem that demands to be written. Filled with laudanum and “having slept for some hours,” Robinson calls “her daughter,” demanding her to take the poetic dictation. In a state of bewitched possession by a “spirit of inspiration” that would not “be subdued,” Robinson verbally dictates to her note-taking daughter a long poem “much faster than it could be committed to paper” (139).¹⁰ On one occasion while visiting with Edmund Burke's son, Richard, Robinson shocked onlookers by pouring forth her “poetic effusions.” According to the memoirs, the stunned Burke could only stand by and watch as poetic passages spontaneously and naturally gushed from her mouth. The transitory quality of Robinson's poetry, as it teetered on the edge of disappearance, was the very quality that saw it to the permanent page and the solid shelf. After being “solemnly assured” by Robinson that the poem was an on-the-spot original, Burke had her poem “inserted in the Annual Register, with the flattering encomium from the pen of the eloquent and ingenious editor [Edmund Burke]” (135).

However small the crumb of flattery Edmund Burke tossed Robinson's way, his endorsement of Robinson at the shadowy end of her life gave her a respectability missing from her early life. In fact, Robinson's illness more than her poetry occasioned Burkean approval. In her early life, Robinson was portrayed as one who flaunted her body. Such flagrant self-promotion yielding female social strength actually weakened the political body, according to Edmund Burke. Female weakness of body, on the other hand, was attractive and desirable but nondisruptive. A healthy social and political body depended on it since it depended on men's desire to be chivalrous.¹¹ In her debilitating illness, Robinson became synonymous with Burke's idealization of Marie Antoinette in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. This queen, in effect a model for Robinson, was made for suffering. “She bears,” wrote Burke,

the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race.

(169)

The afflicted queen embodied for Burke the kind of womanly weakness that incited “generous loyalty to rank and sex.” The “character” of “modern Europe” was seriously in need of “chivalry,” that “nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise” (170).

Coleridge may have had similar motives for persuading Southey to include and “preserve” Robinson in his Annual Anthology. The Anthology served, in part, to build England's sense of stable identity through a national literature that would support the country's political objectives. Charming poems with “stimulating” meter by the physically weak and emotionally sensitive Robinson, as Coleridge put her case to Southey, strengthened the literary might of the more manly poets, like Southey himself.¹² In an appeal to Southey's literary virility and chivalry, Coleridge remarked that “she idolizes you and your doings.” He encouraged Southey to have “respect for a woman poet's feelings” and thus amplified her weakness by calling attention to her femininity. The appeal worked. In 1800, when Robinson was physically at her weakest, Southey printed not just one but two of Robinson's poems, “Jasper” and “The Haunted Beach.” Robinson was thus preserved, but so meagerly she would have disappeared if not for the efforts of Maria Elizabeth. The Wild Wreath mimics and mocks Southey's Anthology. Both volumes work on a premise of selectivity, but in The Wild Wreath the odds are in Robinson's favor. She is selected more than twenty times, whereas Southey appears but once.

III. LITERARY CELEBRITY

In the first few years after Robinson's death, Maria Elizabeth sent a series of missives to various literary quarters. Her motives were two-fold. She wanted to amass some posthumous information about her mother and to establish Robinson's reputation within a larger poetic circle, one that was emphatically “Romantic.” She was intent on surrounding her mother with literary luminaries, just as the living Robinson had been surrounded by men of social and political power and women of fame. In 1801, Maria Elizabeth wrote to Godwin asking for “any letters from my darling Mother … which you think would do her credit.” Maria Elizabeth vaguely referred to her own editorial role as “accessory” to “something like” a “biographer.”¹³ A year later, she made a somewhat different appeal to Coleridge, who had, like Godwin, supported Robinson's literary efforts in the last years of her life. Maria Elizabeth asked for permission to publish Coleridge's poetry alongside the work of Robinson's and other writers—like M. G. Lewis—in a collection she was planning. But since The Wild Wreath was to be first and foremost a book to build a lasting reputation, finding poetic contributors was not without its problems.

Whatever appeal Maria Elizabeth made to Coleridge in reference to her planned volume, Coleridge saw the purpose of the volume solely in terms of what he called “literary celebrity”—both his own and that of Robinson's. In a moment of false-modesty (which he denies), Coleridge complained that “The Gentlemen, with whose names you wish to associate mine are of such widely diffused literary celebrity, that no one will accuse me of mock humility … when I say (confining my meaning exclusively to literary celebrity) that my name would place theirs in company below their rank.” As one who thus had his own poetic reputation at stake, Coleridge reminded Maria Elizabeth of her editorial responsibility: “On your conduct, on your prudence, much of her reputation, much of her justification will ultimately depend.” He warned her not to “connect” Robinson's “posthumous writing” (and by extension, his own poetry) “with the poems of men whose names are highly offensive to all good men and women,” men such as Peter Pindar, Thomas Moore, and M. G. Lewis, whose name was synonymous with The Monk. Coleridge's insistence that Robinson's reputation depended on Maria Elizabeth's editorial finesse seems to have strengthened her resolve. Presumably Coleridge granted her permission to publish “The Mad Monk” in The Wild Wreath; his Gothically-charged poem does appear alongside Monk Lewis's “The Felon” and Robinson's own Gothic tales such as “The Foster-Child.”¹⁴

The Wild Wreath foregrounds the Gothic genre as a way of establishing the Romantic nature of Robinson's literary accomplishment. Among the characters that haunt her poems, “The Lady of the Black Tower” stands out. On its simplest level, the poem uses standard Gothic conventions to tell the story of a nameless “Lady” who spends her life “sad, and lone,” “Upon a lofty tower” waiting for her true love to return from the holy wars. The Lady's waiting game in the dark tower—where she is surrounded by “graves below” and “barefoot monks” “of order grey”—turns on her inability to tell the difference between the ghostly and the “real.” The Lady experiences a kind of double vision. She first sees her knight “clad in doublet gold and green,” but on a second look she finds him transformed into “a giant spectre” “with sightless skull and bony hand.” In the next scene, the Lady meets a “castle lord” “in a doublet gold and green,” but this figure, too, turns phantasmagorically fearsome:

He led her thro' a gothic hall,
With bones and skulls encircled ‘round,
She mark'd a faint and vapoury flame;
Upon the horrid feast it shone—
And there, too close the madd'ning sight,
Unnumber'd spectres met the light.

The poem offers to the reader no defense against the Lady's wild imaginings. Her visions of the spectral, phantom world control the tale, making it function through a dynamic of presence and power through absence. A similar logic informs “The Foster-Child.” The child's anonymity makes him the “blazing” center of “village gossips”: Some swear he is “of lowly birth, / While others thought him born of savage wild,” and still others are sure he is “some witch's brat.”

Placing the previously unpublished “The Lady of the Black Tower” in a prominent place in The Wild Wreath may have been Maria Elizabeth's way of pointing to Robinson's own spectral power as the ghostly author behind the volume, but other poems recall Robinson's interest in the lively, embodied power of late eighteenth-century London. In a study of English reading audiences from 1790-1832, Klancher explains that in the eighteenth century, English writers assumed a more limited sense of audience than they would at the turn of the century, when writers began to cultivate, for the first time, a mass audience. This “vast, unsolicited audience” would demand that writers “construct myths of ‘the author’” and thus “become a public event or performance” (172-73). Robinson no doubt envisioned her own relationship with audiences as part of this transition. As editor of the poetry section of the Post, she would have had some sense that her poetry was a performance for a mass audience.¹⁵ But in the last year of her life, Robinson thought of her readers primarily in terms of subscribers, who were significantly different from the amorphous mob of unmanageable readers that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This new sense of public coincided exactly with how crowds and mass people were portrayed in fictions and verse. In the late eighteenth century, crowds still retained an indefinable quality, the “ten thousand” strangers of Wordsworth's Prelude. By the turn of the century, such strangers became individuals with faces, names, and things to do.

When Maria Elizabeth followed her mother's wishes in publishing the Memoirs and several posthumous poems in 1801 for her “subscribers” (150), she may have had Robinson's more limited eighteenth-century sense of audience in mind. The Wild Wreath targets a wider circle of readers. At the center of the volume is “London's Summer Morning,” which pictures its crowd exclusively through specificity. The “sooty Chimney-boy,” the “sleepy House-maid” and other figures live and talk within the poem's stanzas (ll. 4-6). The “Lamplighter” “mounts the slight ladder” to “trim the half-filled lampe; while at his feet / The Pot-boy yells discordant” and “the hunger-giving cries of vegetables-venders, fill the air” (ll. 29-32; 13-14). Individual human noises give way to no less differentiated city sounds: “The din of Hackney-coaches, waggons, carts,” “noisey trunk-makers, / Knife-grinders, coopers,” and “squeaking cork-cutters” (ll. 10-12). The poem's specificity centered readers on what Klancher calls the issue of “belonging” by asking them to question their own relationship to the social, political, and economic circles of the city (82).

At issue in the volume was also Robinson's own sense of belonging. When Robinson wrote for the Post, she wrote for a mass audience, but she also wrote from within a select poetic circle. At least eight of Robinson's poems in The Wild Wreath appeared in the Post between 1798 and 1800. By choosing to reprint the newspaper poems, Maria Elizabeth was doing more than simply preserving these works. Robinson's Post poems had established her as a woman in good literary company. There she carried on playful poetic exchanges with Robert Merry and Coleridge. These literary repartees involved variations on a suggestive theme, such as a “snowdrop,” but also often included writing in the public forum under various pseudonyms. This period Maria Elizabeth refers to as her “poetical disguise” (Perdita 136). Judith Pascoe points out that Robinson wrote under at least eight different pseudonyms. She was “‘Laura Maria,’ ‘Oberon,’ ‘Sappho,’ ‘Julia,’ ‘Lesbia,’ ‘Portia,’ ‘Bridget,’ and ‘Tabitha Bramble’” (“Mary Robinson” 260), taking on poetic personas to echo her stage career. By including many of the Post poems in The Wild Wreath, Maria Elizabeth's volume may have presumed that readers had a familiarity with Robinson's poetical disguises. Significantly, these disguises defined Robinson as a “ghost-writer,” whose presence was expressed most strongly when it was least visible.

Maria Elizabeth's careful control over Robinson's posthumous reputation in The Wild Wreath was successful, at least among the audiences and reviewers of her own day. The reviewer for the Monthly Review apparently did not object to her subtly alluring presentation of her mother as well as her placement of her mother amidst a circle of Romantic poets. Thus, “Several pieces which compose this collection flowed from the pen of the late Mrs. Robinson,” the Monthly noted, along with the fact that she was surrounded by “other contributions” from “Mr. Merry, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Twisleton, and Miss Seward.” The Monthly described Robinson's poems as attractive monuments to “the lovers of English poetry,” and it praised “The Lady of the Black Tower” as a “wild romantic tale.” The nicely packaged Wild Wreath produced an equally well packaged Robinson, one who was more ghostly than physical and fortunately more poetic than “promiscuous.” “This volume is elegantly printed,” the Monthly proclaimed, “and deserves to be distinguished from the promiscuous herd of ordinary compilations.”¹⁶

Maria Elizabeth did not stop here. The Wild Wreath admittedly gave Robinson a social make-over and surrounded her with a celebrity circle, but it had not established her as a leading English poet. Perhaps this is why, just two years later, in 1806, Maria Elizabeth prepared and edited The Poetical Works of the late Mrs. Mary Robinson in three volumes. Within the anatomy of poetic collections, as Neil Fraistat explains, the title “Poetical Works” signals the collection as either the work of a classical author or a “recent modern author with an assured place in literary history” (11). The word “Works” implies that the poet in question is important in some main tradition, and this may be why Robinson's Poetical Works were denounced. The Annual Review, in particular, ridiculed Maria Elizabeth's prefatory declaration that “the most excellent part of [Robinson's] character” could be found in her poetry “when the mere annals of a beautiful woman are no more remembered.” And, when Maria Elizabeth held Robinson up as a woman of “sensibility” and “tenderness,” the Annual disagreed. They instead defined “sensibility” as “a most bewitching power” often misused by promiscuous women such as Robinson, “these very mistresses of colonels, captains, and ensigns—from that guilty, but much enduring class of women, who rashly bartering away the good opinion of the world, the respect of friends, and the care of legal protectors, receive nothing in exchange.”¹⁷ The Annual thus muddied Robinson's relationships to the circle of society and friends that had always been important her. It ground her poetic reputation into the dirt.

But the Annual Review does not hold the final word on Robinson's posthumous reputation. In the twentieth century, her poetry, memoirs, and novels continue to interest male and female editors and critics. Like Maria Elizabeth, contemporary critics seem especially eager to place Robinson in a poetic circle, one based on current notions of canonicity and literary reputation. Susan Luther, Judith Pascoe, Stuart Curran, Tim Fulford, and Kathryn Ledbetter have all examined Robinson's relation to poetic circles that include Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. M. Ray Adams locates Robinson within the circle of English radicalism in her literary and epistolary correspondence with Godwin and Robert Merry. Others, such as Linda Peterson, Jacqueline M. Labbe, and Jerome McGann have placed Robinson in female literary traditions and have associated her with other women writers of her day such as Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon. This revival of interest in Robinson in the twentieth century is precisely in keeping with her own last wishes. One of her last poems, engraved on her tombstone in Old Windsor Church-yard, envisions just this sort of posthumous resurrection. In the final line of this late poem, Robinson pictures herself hauntingly reaching forward to “snatch a wreath beyond the grave.”

Notes

1. For analysis of Robinson's poetics of melancholy, see Labbe and Miskolcze.

2. Morning Post, December 11, 1776.

3. Morning Post, December 14, 1776.

4. Linda Peterson suggests that Robinson defined herself in terms of “motherhood and authorship” and that “she would have viewed her Memoirs as a legacy to her daughter. Begun on her death bed in 1799, it was a final literary production to provide financial support for Maria, who edited, completed, and published the text in 1801 after her mother's death” (48). The title Perdita was added to the Memoirs in the 1994 edition.

5. The Monthly Review, October 1777.

6. Eleanor Ty argues that “in agreeing to sit to Romney, Reynolds, and Gainsborough in 1781-82, Robinson participated in the production of her representation” (411).

7. Letter from Mary Robinson to William Godwin, August 24, 1800, Abinger Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Dep.b.215/2.

8. Letter from Mary Robinson to William Godwin, August 28, 1800, Dep.b.215/2.

9. Letter from Mary Robinson to William Godwin, September 10, 1800, Dep.b.215/2.

10. Linda Peterson offers an explanation of this incident based on the tradition of the improvisatrice (38).

11. I would like to thank Tim Fulford for pointing me to the connection between Robinson, Burke, and chivalry.

12. I take all quotations from Coleridge's letters from Griggs's first publication of them in 1930.

13. Letter from Maria Elizabeth to William Godwin, Dep.b.214/3.

14. See Susan Luther (403) for the history and uncertain status of Coleridge's “The Mad Monk.”

15. See Pascoe, “Mary Robinson,” 253. I would like to thank Judith Pascoe for providing me with additional information about Robinson's Post poems.

16. Monthly Review, 1804, Vol. 45: 318-19.

17. Annual Review for 1806, Vol. 5 (1807): 516-18.

Works Cited

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Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien. London: Penguin, 1986.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison.” Romanticism: An Anthology. Wu 511-13.

Curran, Stuart. “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context.” Wilson and Haefner 17-35.

Fraistat, Neil. The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1985.

Fulford, Tim. “Coleridge and Mary Robinson: Feminizing the Sublime.” Unpublished essay.

Griggs, Earl Leslie. “Coleridge and Mrs. Mary Robinson.” Modern Language Notes 65 (1930): 90-95.

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McGann, Jerome. “Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho.” Modern Language Quarterly 56.1 (1995): 55-76.

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Pascoe, Judith. “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace.” Romantic Women Writers. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelly. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1995.

———. “The Spectacular Flaneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London.” The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (1992): 165-71.

Peterson, Linda H. “Becoming an Author: Mary Robinson's Memoirs and the Origins of the Woman Artist's Autobiography.” Wilson and Haefner 36-56.

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Robinson, Mary. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Ed. M. J. Levy. London: Peter Owen, 1994.

———. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson. 3 vols. Ed. Maria Elizabeth Robinson London: Richard Phillips, 1806.

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