Judith Pascoe has described Mary Robinson as a “cultural chameleon” who adopted “every literary fashion” during the 1790s.¹ In this article, I shall explore what was perhaps Robinson's most remarkable change of literary colour, her 1799 proto-feminist tract, Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Early on in this text, Robinson states her rhetorical strategy in the following terms:

In order that this letter may be clearly understood, I shall proceed to prove my assertion in the strongest, but most undecorated language. I shall remind my enlightened country-women that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man: and, where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capable of all that prejudice and custom have united in attributing, exclusively, to the thinking faculties of man. I argue thus, and my assertions are incontrovertible.²

It is not, of course, particularly surprising to find writers of this decade claiming the epithet “undecorated” for themselves, regardless of how purple their prose might seem to modern readers. During the romantic period as a whole, terms such as “plain”, “artless” and “undecorated” were some of the most highly prized qualities to which a writer could aspire. They were also some of the most subjectively determined: critics repeatedly describe writers of whom they approve politically as having a “plain” style, while castigating those writers with whom they disagree for being “artificial” and “ornate”.³ Even so, “strong” and “undecorated” are hardly the words that spring to mind in connection with Robinson in her earlier literary incarnations as a novelist of sensibility or a poet of the Della Cruscan school.⁴ Coupled with the direct and assertive tone of the passage, they suggest a clear conception of the kind of pamphlet she is writing, as well as a distinct change of direction from her other writings. In this article, I will explore how far, and in what ways, Robinson puts into practice this statement of stylistic intent, examining in particular the literary persona that she seeks to create for herself, and the way in which she addresses her audience. In order to do so, I will focus on a number of salient linguistic features, including her use of adjectives and personal pronouns.

As a point of reference, I will use her earlier foray as a political writer, Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France. Published in 1791, Impartial Reflections was a passionate, if somewhat idiosyncratic, contribution to the ongoing French Revolution debate. In it, Robinson expresses strongly pro-Revolution sentiments, describing France as “an enlightened nation, emancipated from slavery by the most sublime and dignified enthusiasm”.⁵ Simultaneously, however, she laments the imprisonment of Marie Antoinette and appeals to the French nation to end their Queen's suffering. The text draws heavily on the sensationalism and sentimentality of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (even the title of Robinson's text pays homage to Burke), yet it does so in order to maintain a political position in direct opposition to that of Burke (the word “impartial” in Robinson's title presumably carries with it the accusation that Burke's Reflections were anything but “impartial”). This combination of Burke's pro-Marie Antoinette rhetoric with pro-revolution sentiments evidently puzzled the reviewer for the Monthly Review, who comments that:

we have only to observe, in plain language, there appears to be a total difference and opposition between the political ideas of these towering geniuses. Mr. B. was the declared and enraged enemy of the French Revolution: but, on the contrary, the eloquent flowery declaimer, whose performance is now before us, bestows the warmest applause on the great event; which he praises as an act of “the most sublime and dignified enthusiasm, bursting through the bonds of galling subjection”—In short, there is an appearance of inconsistency in this apology for the Queen of France … which leaves us at some loss to determine its real character, or to say what may have been the ultimate view and purpose of the writer.⁶

Despite the apparent contradiction, Robinson's text can be seen to have two clear rhetorical goals: that of reclaiming the moral authority of sympathising with a wronged woman, and that of using Burke's attack on the “unchivalric” nature of the French Revolution to goad the French into proving him wrong:

It is now in the power of that august Tribunal to prove, that “the Days of Chivalry” are not “at an end;” that as they have given innumerable testimonies of their patriotism and judgment, they also cherish the laudable and dignified sentiment of justice and humanity!⁷

In terms of style, as the Monthly Review's comments on the “eloquent flowery declaimer” suggest, Robinson is indebted both to Burke's highly charged emotionalism in Reflections, and to her own ornate Della Cruscan poetry. Unsurprisingly, at no point in Impartial Reflections does she claim that her style is either “strong” or “undecorated”. It thus seems reasonable to interpret her statement of stylistic intent at the start of Letter to the Women of England as, at least in part, a reaction against her earlier attempt at political polemic in Impartial Reflections.

As a second point of reference, I will also be comparing Letter to the Women of England to other proto-feminist texts published during the 1790s. It must be remembered that, in writing such a tract in 1799, Robinson was working within an established genre: pamphlets arguing for better education and more opportunities for women had already been published by, among others, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Hays, Catherine Macaulay and, most famously, Mary Wollstonecraft. Robinson clearly owes much to her immediate forerunners, most notably Wollstonecraft. Even Robinson's declaration that she would use “the strongest, most undecorated language” can be seen as mirroring Wollstonecraft's own declaration at the beginning of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style;—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!—and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation.⁸

Although I would not wish to suggest there is any kind of direct relationship, Wollstonecraft's attack on “that flowery diction” reads almost like a critique of the language of Impartial Reflections. She suggests that in a political pamphlet, elegant and dazzling language (the stock-in-trade of the Della Cruscan poet) quickly becomes self-defeating. Her argument is also strongly gendered: “that flowery diction” is associated with the prototypically female genres of the period (novels, familiar letters and conversation), and she suggests that it is only by rejecting this language that a writer such as herself can hope to be successful in rendering women “more respectable”.⁹

This alignment of writing style with political respectability and gender is significant, as writing as a woman on the rights of women in the 1790s was by no means unproblematic. Although it was a decade of great public debate about the rights of men, it was, by and large, presumed to be precisely that: a debate about the rights of men. There was a similar assumption that not only the subjects of but also the participants in the debate were male. When, for example, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men anonymously in 1790, reviewers assumed her to be male; and when Robinson published Impartial Reflections in 1791, signing herself simply as “a friend to humanity”, the Monthly Review likewise assumed male authorship. When a woman attempted to articulate her own political perspective on issues relating to her own gender, she faced considerable difficulties in placing herself in the subject position and finding a suitable voice in which to write. Should she write to women, about women, or on behalf of women, and what linguistic implications did her decision have? Should she adopt a style deemed appropriate to her gender, or should she attempt to subvert gender expectations? It is possible to see each of the female writers on women's rights of the 1790s grappling with this problem, and Robinson's claims about “the strongest, most undecorated language” suggest that she was, at least in part, influenced by Wollstonecraft's stylistic programme. As I shall demonstrate, however, Robinson does not simply replicate the rhetorical strategies of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She herself states in a footnote:

The writer of this letter, though avowedly of the same school, disdains the drudgery of servile imitation. The same subject may be argued in a variety of ways; and though this letter may not display the philosophical reasoning with which “The Rights of Woman” abounded; it is not less suited to the purpose. For it requires a legion of Wollstonecrafts to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence.¹⁰

Robinson may have been following a fashion in writing a tract on the rights of women, but she actively engages with that fashion, and moulds it to her own purposes.

To start at the beginning with Letter to the Women of England, the title creates the expectation that the pamphlet will be written in an epistolary style. In the late eighteenth century, the most salient characteristics of epistolary writing, according to the many manuals on the subject, were that letters should be informal and spontaneous. For example, two educational handbooks, by Fordyce and Hodson respectively, offer the following advice:

As letters are the copies of conversation, just consider what you would say to your friend if he was present, and write down the very words you would speak, which will render your epistle unaffected, and intelligible.¹¹

Of every species of composition, there is none that, in its nature, approaches nearer to familiar conversation, except plain dialogue, than Epistolary writing. A letter is a direct address from one person to another, and should, therefore, contain all the ease, elegance, and familiarity of conversation.¹²

Letter writing, because of its private nature, is described by both Hodson and Fordyce as being inherently conversational and familiar. This in turn meant that it was held to be particularly suitable for female talents. Wollstonecraft, praising Helen Maria Williams's Letters Written in France in the Analytical Review, makes the following observation:

Women have been allowed to possess, by a kind of prescription, the knack of epistolary writing; the talent of chatting on paper in that easy immethodical manner, which render letters dear to friends, and amusing to strangers.¹³

Letter writing is again associated with conversation: it is “chatting on paper”, and it is this which makes it a peculiarly female form. It is also clear from Wollstonecraft's comments that it has a somewhat marginal status: it is a “knack” rather than a “skill”; and it is “dear” and “amusing” rather than being important or powerful. But at the same time, it must be noted that Letters Written in France is a fundamentally political text. In it, Williams records her own experiences of revolutionary France in glowing terms and refutes possible criticisms of the new republic.¹⁴ Looked at in these terms, Wollstonecraft's potentially condescending comments about “the knack of chatting on paper” appear more aggrandising: she is claiming not just the private letter but the political letter as a peculiarly female form. As such, it is perhaps no coincidence that when, later that year, she came to write her own political text, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she chose to do so in epistolary form.

When letters were written for explicitly political purposes, however, their marginal status became both a strength and a weakness. On the positive side, the personal and spontaneous nature of letter writing acted as a guarantee of the sincerity of the writer. The writer could further emphasise this by assuring the reader in the preface that the letter was originally written without the intention of publication. Two famous and relevant examples from the 1790s are:

having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and indeed when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, [the author] found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent, and had received another direction.¹⁵

Many pages of the following letter were the effusions of the moment; but, swelling imperceptibly to a considerable size, the idea was suggested of publishing a short vindication of the Rights of Men.¹⁶

On the negative side, however, the personal and spontaneous nature of letter writing always had the possibility of tipping over into carelessness and self-indulgence, or stagnating into artifice (as indeed Wollstonecraft suggests when she criticises the “flowery diction” which has been transmitted through “familiar letters”). Furthermore, the exploitation of the “private” letter for public political purposes itself called into question the inherent sincerity of the epistolary form, as Mary Favret discusses in Romantic Correspondence.

once “looseness” and “negligence” were known to lend themselves to politics, letters could not easily resume a respectable place in the literary market. They were tainted goods.¹⁷

Mary Robinson's decision to title her pamphlet as a “letter” is thus a double-edged one. There were distinct disadvantages: the political letter had been severely compromised in the course of the French Revolution debate, and ran the risk of seeming either uncontrolled or insincere. On the positive side, however, by calling it a “letter” she was choosing a form which declared a modestly limited ambition for her text, and which was as appropriate as possible for a woman venturing into the realm of politics.

What is perhaps most interesting about Letter to the Women of England, however, is how non-epistolary the text actually is. So far in my discussion, I have identified a number of features which were seen to characterize the letter at the end of the eighteenth century. Letters were prototypically personal, spontaneous, unregulated, immethodical, conversational and easy. Political letter writers often drew attention to these qualities, as I have illustrated with the passages from Wollstonecraft and Burke. Elsewhere I have argued that criticisms that Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men is poorly structured fail to take into account the extent to which this perception is deliberately invited by Wollstonecraft herself.¹⁸ By emphasising the lack of planning and polish, Wollstonecraft simultaneously emphasises the lack of design or deception. However, in Robinson's Letter, the tropes of “this letter-was-originally-private-but-I-have-been-persuaded-to-publish-it” and “forgive-the-imperfections-of-this-letter-but-it-was-written-quickly” are noticeably absent. In fact, at no time in the entire text does Robinson refer to the circumstances that originally induced her to write the text, or provide any information about its mode of production. Nor does she at any point apologise for a lack of planning or polish.

Another unexpected feature of Robinson's Letter is her sparing use of first person singular pronouns. By definition, a letter is written from one individual to another individual or group of individuals: from the I that is doing the writing, to the you to whom it is addressed. It might therefore be predicted that the letter form will contain many more first person singular pronouns than other, less personal, genres. Indeed, this was one of the chief advantages of the political epistle in the late eighteenth century: it permitted the writer to introduce their own personal viewpoint very directly. However, Robinson uses a very small number of first person singular pronouns. Table I shows a count for the total number of first person pronouns in Letter to the Women of England compared to samples of text of the same size from Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hays's Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (direct quotations have been excluded from the count as I am interested in the writer's own presentation of self in the text). Surprisingly, both Wollstonecraft and Hays use over three times as many first person singular pronouns as Robinson. Their high usage of first person singular pronouns can be accounted for by the element of direct address in their texts: Hays's pamphlet is an “appeal”, which, like a letter, implies a personal communication from an individual to a group of people; Wollstonecraft's pamphlet opens with a letter to Talleyrand and throughout maintains a strong sense of an individual speaking directly to her audience. Robinson's comparatively small number of first person pronouns remains to be accounted for, however.

Table I. Total number of first person singular pronouns in Robinson's Letter to the Women of England, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hays's Appeal to the Men of Great Britain. Direct quotations from other writers have not been included. As Robinson's Letter is then only 10,992 words long, only the first 10,992 words (excluding quotations) of Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Hays's Appeal have been used to make the samples comparable.

Joan Mulholland, discussing Wollstonecraft, analyses some of the problems inherent in the use of “the overt authorial I”. She finds that because it reminds readers of the personal origin of what they are reading, it can, ironically, produce “an impression of impersonal distance and formality”.¹⁹ By continually making readers aware of the authorial voice, space is created in which readers can consider whether or not they agree with that voice. This problem becomes apparent when we compare a passage from Wollstonecraft to a passage from Robinson, where both are reasoning about the relationship between bodily strength and intellectual strength in men and women. The passage from Wollstonecraft shows a particularly high use of first person singular pronouns, where the passage from Robinson contains none. It should be noted that these passages are intended to be illustrative of some of the effects created when first person singular pronouns are used, rather than representative of the pamphlets as a whole. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman does not always contain this density of first person pronouns.

Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seemed to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.

(Wollstonecraft)²⁰

In what is woman inferior to man? In some instances, but not always, in corporeal strength: in activity of mind, she is his equal. Then, by this rule, if she is to endure oppression in proportion as she is deficient in muscular power, only, through all the stages of animation the weaker should give precedence to the stronger. Yet we should find a Lord of the Creation with a puny frame, reluctant to confess the superiority of a lusty peasant girl, whom nature had endowed with that bodily strength of which luxury had bereaved him.

(Robinson)²¹

There are a number of similarities between these passages. Both writers are attempting to refute a commonly held opinion about the differences between the sexes, and both attempt to do so through reasoned argument. Both use rhetorical questions in order to engage the reader. In terms of their use of first person singular pronouns, however, the passages are very different. Wollstonecraft uses the pronoun “I” six times. This gives the passage a very personal perspective: it is the writing “I” who “see[s] not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature”, and who feels forced to “strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction as, that there is a God”. The passage sounds as though Wollstonecraft is actively arguing with an interlocutor, one whom she is guiding through her own thought processes. This has the advantage of encouraging the reader to take up the position of the interlocutor, and thereby feel directly involved in the text. However, it also creates the potential that a reader may feel that they can argue back. A reader who disagrees with Wollstonecraft's perspective may feel that that there is a reason to conclude that women's virtues are different, or that Wollstonecraft is not reasoning consequentially when she deduces women's virtues have the same directions as men's. By contrast, in Robinson's passage, each step of the argument is affirmed as a matter of fact rather than a matter of opinion. This arguably leaves less space for the reader to disagree with her perspective.

It is also noticeable that when Robinson does use first person pronouns, she tends to avoid “private” verbs—that is, those such as think, feel and believe, which are to do with the mental state of the speaker. She does use them occasionally. “I believe” appears three times, “I remember” four times and “I trust” once, but generally, when she use “I”, she tends to use it to describe what she is doing textually: “I shall endeavour to prove”, “I will boldly assert”, “I will not attempt to philosophize”, “I again recur to the prominent subject of my letter”. As such, it is an impersonal device for organising her text, rather than a device for telling us how she feels or what she thinks. For both Hays and Wollstonecraft, there is a much higher instance of “private” verbs. In Wollstonecraft, for example, we find “I am aware”, “I hope”, “I feel whenever I think”, and “I deplore”, and in Hays, “I believe”, “I always feared”, “I begin to hope” and “I trust”.

Although Robinson's comparatively limited, and impersonal, use of the first person singular pronoun mean that the reader is directly reminded less frequently of the individual author who stands behind the opinions and beliefs of the text, it would, of course, be inaccurate to conclude that Robinson's text is impersonal and dispassionate. Her frequent use of exclamation marks, rhetorical questions and emotive adjectives, for example, all register her feelings strongly and clearly. Her use of attributive adjectives is particularly interesting as it both registers the writer's feelings, and is relevant in terms of Robinson's supposed stylistic “floweriness”. Judith Pascoe points out that an excess of descriptive phrases is indicative of the aesthetic priorities of Della Cruscan verse:

A reviewer of Mary Robinson's poetic sequence Sappho and Phaon, reacting to this aspect of her early verse, writes, “Her course would be more graceful, if she would not so often start aside to hunt after flowers.” But Della Cruscan poems have more to do with flowery asides than with staying the course. In the Cowley excerpt just quoted there are fifteen adjectives or adjectival phrases in the space of sixteen lines; indeed the coining of new descriptive phrases is one of the particular pleasures of writing in this mode.²²

It could be assumed that when writing a political pamphlet, particularly one which publicly urged a certain group of people towards a certain course of action, “staying the course” would assume a far greater importance. Nevertheless, Impartial Reflections sees any number of “flowery asides”, and a heavy deployment of adjectives. In the text as a whole, there are approximately 103 attributive adjectives (i.e. adjectives premodifying a noun) per 1000 words. This is an astonishingly high figure, and indeed, at several points the text reads very much like a prose Della Cruscan poem, with the plight of Marie Antoinette being taken as the starting point for a series of flowery and emotional apostrophes. For example:

she had no path to choose but the beaten track; she found it besprinkled with roses, nor thought of the pointed thorns cautiously concealed under the gaudy parterre of dazzling magnificence. In this seeming bower of eternal delight, this witching semblance of a terrestrial paradise, the opening blossoms of fascinating pleasure presented themselves before her; the poisonous weeds that overspread an oppressed country, met not her eye, the wide waste of desolating horrors was unknown to her.²³

Although, as I have suggested, Impartial Reflections can be seen to have clear rhetorical objectives, the exuberant excess of its descriptiveness means that it is possible to sympathise with the Monthly's perplexity as to the “ultimate view and purpose of the writer”. Comparing Impartial Reflections to Letter to the Women of England, it is possible to see that, by Robinson's standards at least, Letter to the Women of England represents a significant retrenchment in the deployment of adjectives: there are only 65 attributive adjectives per 1000 words. This figure is close to that used by Wollstonecraft, who averages 60 attributive adjectives per 1000 words in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.²⁴ As these figures suggest, neither Robinson nor Wollstonecraft entirely eschew attributive adjectives, and it is possible to find passages with a dense use of highly emotive adjectives. For example:

Nothing can set the regal character in a more contemptible point of view, than the various crimes that have elevated men to the supreme dignity.—Vile intrigues, unnatural crimes, and every vice that degrades our nature, have been the steps to this distinguished eminence; yet millions of men have supinely allowed the nerveless limbs of the posterity of such rapacious prowlers to rest quietly on their ensanguined thrones.

(Wollstonecraft)²⁵

It has lately been the fashion of the time, to laugh at the encreasing consequence of women, in the great scale of human intellect. Why? Because, by their superior lustre, the overweening and ostentatious splendour of some men, is placed in a more obscure point of view. The women of France have been by some popular, though evidently prejudiced writers, denominated little better than she-devils! And yet we have scarcely heard one instance, excepting in the person of the vain and trifling Madame Du Barry, in which females of that country have not displayed almost Spartan fortitude even as they ascended the scaffold.

(Robinson)²⁶

What is true, however, is that in these texts, both writers typically reserve these strings of emotive adjectives for subjects on which they feel strongly, and that neither engages in quite the same dazzlingly poeticism that we find in Impartial Reflections.

Returning to the subject of first person singular pronouns, it is instructive to think about what these writers are doing when they use a personal pronoun. Although pronouns are often described in textbooks as replacing full nouns, for example, “Pronouns refer to people or things, and are used to replace full nouns (hence their name)”²⁷, this definition applies more accurately to third person pronouns than to first or second person pronouns. Personal pronouns are, as Emile Benveniste notes in his chapter, “The Nature of Pronouns”, peculiarly self-referential terms:

What then is the reality to which I or you refers? It is solely a “reality of discourse,” and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of “locution,” not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies “the person who is uttering the present instance of discourse containing I.”²⁸

In an ordinary correspondence, the way in which the first person pronoun is employed can be manipulated to provide the addressee with a particular impression of “the person who is uttering the present instance of discourse containing I”. The I in a letter written to a bank manager asking for an extended overdraft will be rather different from the I in a letter to an old friend inviting her to stay. In most cases, however, the recipient of the letter will be able to assume that the I corresponds to the signature at the bottom of the letter, and will read the I in the context of whatever other knowledge they have of the writer, be it from a set of bank records, or a long and intimate friendship.

With a published letter, that “other knowledge” will be whatever knowledge the reader already has about the writer. From this perspective, it seems significant that Letter to the Women of England was published under the pseudonym of Anne Frances Randall. As Pascoe has discussed, Robinson used a wide range of pseudonyms when publishing her poetry—Laura Maria, Tabitha Bramble, Oberon, Sappho, Julia, Lesbia, Portia, Bridget, etc.²⁹ Anne Frances Randall, however, is qualitatively rather different from other Robinson pseudonyms. Where names such as Laura Maria, Tabitha Bramble or Sappho announce themselves as pseudonyms, Anne Frances Randall sounds like a real name. Indeed, the reviewer for the Monthly Review comments that he does not know whether she is a Miss Randall or a Mrs Randall, implying a basic assumption that she is a real person.³⁰ In choosing a pseudonym, Robinson was rejecting the alternative means of disguising her identity, which would have been to have published anonymously, as she had done in Impartial Reflections, and as Hays had done the previous year with her Appeal (Hays published it anonymously, while making it clear that the author was female). By not publishing anonymously, Robinson not only disguised her authorship, but also disguised the disguise.

It is possible that in doing so she was influenced by what she would have seen happen to Wollstonecraft's reputation during the 1790s. When Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman under her own name in 1792, it was greeted with warmth by the radical press, and often with patronising good humour by the more conservative press. With the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, however, both Wollstonecraft's private life and her political ideas were savagely denounced. Godwin's revelations about her sexual history and suicide attempts made it easy for those wishing to attack her political ideas to portray them as inevitably leading to the kind of unconventional private life she was now known to have led, and vice versa. In the passage already quoted from Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes of her desire “to render my sex more respectable members of society”. The publication of Godwin's Memoirs proved that anyone wishing to improve the respectability of women had themselves to be both publicly and privately beyond reproach. For Robinson, already infamous for her highly public extramarital affairs, it must have been obvious that any tract on the rights of women published under her own name was guaranteed to be read, and condemned, in the light of her scandalous reputation. She therefore chose to create an alternate writing self, the wholly unknown Anne Frances Randall. In contrast to the excess of facts, rumour and self-publicity which were known about Mary “Perdita” Robinson, the only evidence for “Anne Frances Randall” comes from within the text itself.

The creation of “Anne Frances Randall” can be seen as intimately linked to Robinson's ongoing strategy in Letter to the Women of England of creating a genealogy of learned and literary women, stretching from classical Greece to modern Britain. At one level, this genealogy is clearly intended to empower contemporary women by demonstrating that the intellectual woman has a long and respectable history. At the same time, however, Robinson is constructing a position of authority for herself (or rather, for Anne Frances Randall) through her mastery of these sources. It is noticeable that when a hostile reviewer attempts to undermine Randall's credibility, he does so by discrediting her scholarship. For example, he quibbles with her claims that no male witches have ever been burnt: “This is a mistake. Of many instances which might be produced, which shall mention only two, which immediately occur to us: Anne Duborg, a Counsellor of Paris, and Urban Grandier, a priest”, and further highlights her ignorance by speculating that “Possibly Mrs. R. might take the former for a woman, from his Christian name”.³¹ By revealing the inadequacy of her scholarship, the reviewer seeks to undermine the intellectual validity both of Randall herself and her argument. Once again, the project of rendering women “more respectable members of society” turns out to be vulnerable to attacks upon the (this time intellectual) reputation of the female writer.

So far, I have suggested that Robinson's text is markedly different from those of Wollstonecraft and Hays in that her use of the first person singular pronoun is both less frequent and less personal. Her use of the second person pronoun is also worthy of investigation. Her text is, after all, Letter to the Women of England, and as such, we might expect a relatively high use of the second person pronoun (see Table II).

Table II. Total number of second person pronouns in Robinson's Letter to the Women of England, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hays's Appeal to the Men of Great Britain. Direct quotations from other writers have not been included. As Robinson's Letter is then only 10,992 words long, only the first 10,992 words (excluding quotations) of Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Hays's Appeal have been used to make the samples comparable.

The numbers are much less striking here, being low for all three writers. What is noticeable about Robinson's use of the second person pronoun, however, is that hardly any of them are addressed to the women of England. This can be seen from the beginning of the text, where she does not choose to begin her letter with “My Dear Countrywomen” or any similar form. It may be a letter, but it is not overtly addressed to anyone in the text itself. Similarly, looking back at the passage which I quoted at the start of this article, Robinson refers to women in the third person when she writes that she will “remind my enlightened country-women that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man”. Given that it is a letter to the women of England, the reader might reasonably expect something more like “I shall remind you, my enlightened country-women, that you are not the mere appendages of domestic life”. In fact, in the text as a whole, the second person pronouns are very inconsistent in their reference, and several appear when she is adopting the voice of a group of people for the sake of her argument. For example, she voices the following argument:

Man says, “you shall be initiated in all the arts of pleasing; but you shall, in vain, hope that we will contribute to your happiness one iota beyond the principle which constitutes our own.” Sensual Egotists! woman is absolutely necessary to your felicity; nay, even to your existence: yet she must not arrogate to herself the power to interest your actions. You idolize her personal attractions, as long as they influence your senses; when they begin to pall, the magick is dissolved; and prejudice is ever eager to condemn what passion has degraded.³²

Although there is a direct address to women here, the quotation marks denote the fact that the addressing voice is not that of the writer: it is we men addressing you women. The argument is then taken up in the writer's own voice, and man is directly addressed as you, although it is noticeable that woman is now referred to in the third person singular as she. This avoidance of a direct address to women might be interpreted as revealing an underlying uncertainty about addressing a specifically female readership, or a tacit acknowledgment that the text is intended to be read by men as much as by women. However, it might also be interpreted more positively as a deliberate strategy to include women in political debate. Given the default assumption in the 1790s that political pamphlets were addressed to a male audience, continually reminding her audience that in this pamphlet they were being addressed on the grounds of their gender alone might serve to perpetuate the assumption. Instead, Robinson addresses her female readership impersonally and indirectly, encouraging them to think rationally about women's rights by arguing rationally herself. In fact, there is only one direct and non-ventriloquised address to woman, and this occurs right at the end:

O! my unenlightened country-women! read, and profit, by the admonition of Reason. Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you. Resist those fascinating spells which, like the petrifying torpedo, fasten on your mental faculties. Be less the slaves of vanity, and more the converts of Reflection. Nature has endowed you with personal attractions: she has also given you the mind capable of expansion. Seek not the visionary triumph of universal conquest; know yourselves equal to greater, nobler, acquirements: and by prudence, temperance, firmness, and reflection, subdue that prejudice which has, for ages past, been your inveterate enemy.³³

Robinson is in barnstorming mode at this point, and for the first time she addresses her female readers as you. In the light of my earlier discussion, it is also interesting to note that this passage is extremely dense in emotive premodifying adjectives: “visionary”, “nobler”, “trifling”, “glittering”, “inveterate”. It seems as though at the point where she wishes to finally turn up the emotional heat, she simultaneously deploys a string of highly emotive adjectives, and exhorts her female reader directly through the second person.

Finally, it is also informative to consider how Robinson uses the first person plural pronoun (Table III).

Table III. Total number of first person plural pronouns in Robinson's Letter to the Women of England, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hays's Appeal to the Men of Great Britain. Direct quotations from other writers have not been included. As Robinson's Letter is then only 10,992 words long, only the first 10,992 words (excluding quotations) of Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Hays's Appeal have been used to make the samples comparable.

Again, the numbers are not particularly striking, with Robinson's usage falling squarely between that of Wollstonecraft and Hays. These figures, however, disguise the fact that Robinson's usage is fundamentally different from that of the other two. Both Hays and Wollstonecraft continually shift their use of we. In Hays, for example, we find both of these examples:

But we relinquish willingly this kind of preference which you force upon us, and which we have no title to; and which indeed is an intolerable burthen in the way you contrive to administer it; and instead of this, we only entreat of you to be fair, to be candid, and to admit, that both sexes are upon a footing of equality.³⁴

Indeed, when we consider how many books are written, and read upon every subject—I may rather say how many myriads of books of every degree of necessary.³⁵

In the first example, we is clearly we women, and men are addressed as you (as might be expected in an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain). In the second example, the we invokes a community inclusive of writer and readers engaged in a shared intellectual project (thereby grouping together Hays with her, at least theoretically, male readership). Similar examples can easily be found in Wollstonecraft. It is possible to read this shifting use of we as evidence of the difficulty in writing on the subject of the rights of woman as a woman. On the one hand, it is desirable to show the allegiance of the writer with the rest of womankind, but on the other hand, in order to write authoritatively on the subject, it is desirable to include reader and writer together in a community of rational intellects. By contrast to Hays and Wollstonecraft, Robinson consistently sticks to a single use, that of we rational beings. As we have already seen, when she represents a generic argument between man and woman, she starts speaking as we men addressing you women, but actively avoids replying as we women. This avoidance of we women can be seen as related to her avoidance of talking to women directly as you, and her concern to establish Anne Frances Randall as a rational and in some ways impersonal textual presence. In fact, there is only one example of we women in the entire text, and that occurs on the title page and is a quotation from a play by Nicholas Rowe: “Wherefore are we / Born with high Souls, but to assert ourselves?” Given Robinson's fastidious avoidance of we women, it seems oddly appropriate that on the only occasion she uses it, she attributes it to a man.

In conclusion, Letter to the Women of England is perhaps a surprising text on a number of levels. Its title indicates that it is a letter, yet it lacks many of the features which might be expected from a letter. Its title also indicates that it is to the women of England, yet they are only addressed directly in one paragraph. It is by a woman, yet that woman never includes herself in the first person plural with other women. Overall, I would suggest that this pattern is indicative of the way in which Robinson is struggling to find a means of writing with authority and dignity as a woman to women. At the outset, Robinson declares her intention to use “the strongest but most undecorated language”. These terms are so subjective that it is impossible to state definitively whether she succeeds or fails. However, I would suggest that the stylistic strategy of Letter to the Women of England is, in its own terms, both “strong” and “undecorated”. Robinson rejects much of the “floweriness” of her earlier political pamphlet, Impartial Reflections, particularly in reducing her use of attributive adjectives. At the same time, she has a clear and consistent strategy in terms of the way in which she chooses to address her audience, which is notably different from that adopted by either Hays or Wollstonecraft. Robinson writes as the unknown, but knowledgeable, Anne Frances Randall, and she writes to the women of England. Yet, she actively avoids continually grouping those women together as either we or you. Instead, the rights of women are presented as an intellectual problem with which the reader is invited to engage on the basis of their intellect, not their gender.

Perversely, Robinson did of course destroy this alternate self, and thus this particular writer-reader relationship, with the publication of the second edition in December 1799, under her own name and with slightly different title, where she comments that:

Finding that a Work on a subject similar to the following, has lately been published at Paris, Mrs. Robinson is induced to avow herself the Author of this Pamphlet.³⁶

This announcement is rather puzzling. It is unclear why the publication of a similar work in Paris necessitated the end of anonymity. Was Robinson afraid that someone else was going to claim credit for her ideas? Was this “work on a similar subject” simply a thin excuse for Robinson, ever the ardent self-promoter, to stand forward as the author? Was it simple financial necessity? Did she feel that her own publication needed the additional attention that it might receive if she was identified as the author? (If so, she was to be disappointed as the second edition created very little stir in the reviewing press. It is mentioned briefly in the Monthly Review, but the reviewer passes no comment on whether the revelation of its authorship surprises him, or makes him view the work in a different way.³⁷) Certainly, knowing that it is by Robinson affects the way in which the text is read. For a start, it makes the text seem far more personal. It is difficult, for example, to read her outbursts against the double standards applied to men and women without remembering her own experiences of just such standards. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that this was not the way that Robinson originally intended her text to be read, and while the relationship between A Letter to the Women of England and the life of Mary Robinson is certainly worth exploring, it is also important not to forget the textual relationship between “Anne Frances Randall” and her readership.

Notes

1. Judith Pascoe (1997) Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 1.

2. Mary Robinson (1799) Letter to the Women of England (London: T. N. Longman & O. Rees), p. 3. Henceforth LWE.

3. In a survey of contemporary reviews of Paine's Rights of Man, for example, I conclude that “whether Paine's style is considered to be plain and truthful, or rhetorically skilful and deceptive depends almost entirely on whether the writer agrees with Paine politically or not”. Jane Hodson (1999) “The Politics of Style in the French Revolution Debate: Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin”, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, p. 190.

4. I found confirmation that this was not an unfair generalisation when it provoked spontaneous laughter among the audience at the “Commemorating Mary Robinson” Conference.

5. Mary Robinson (1791) Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France (London: John Bell), p. 6. Henceforth IR.

6. The Monthly Review (1791), 6 n.s., p. 356.

7. IR, p. 27.

8. Mary Robinson (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd edn (London: Joseph Johnson), pp. 7-8. Henceforth VRW.

9. Wollstonecraft's style has, of course, itself provoked considerable discussion. See for example, Syndy McMillen Conger (1994) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses); Laurie Finke (1992) “Style as Noise: Identity and Ideology in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in Feminist Theory, Women's Writing (Ithaca: Ithaca University Press); and Gary Kelly (1992) Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan).

10. LWE, footnote, p. 2.

11. David Fordyce (1792?) The New and Complete British Letter-writer (London: C. Cooke), p. 24.

12. Thomas Hodson (1800) The Accomplished Tutor, 2 vols (London: The Author), vol. 1, p. 77.

13. Analytical Review (1790), 8, p. 431.

14. Matthew Bray argues that although Letters Written in France was published before Reflections, it can still be seen as a “sustained critique of the ideas of Edmund Burke”, and an advance rebuttal of Reflections. Burke's Speech on Army Estimates would have ensured that Williams was aware of the likely contents of Reflections. “Helen Maria Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity”, Eighteenth Century Life (1992), 16, pp. 1-24.

15. Edmund Burke (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley), pp. iii-iv.

16. Mary Wollstonecraft (1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London: J. Johnson), pp. iii-iv.

17. Mary Favret (1993) Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 24.

18. Hodson, “The Politics of Style”, ch. 3.

19. Joan Mulholland (1995) “Constructing Woman's Authority: A Study of Wollstonecraft's rhetoric in her Vindication, 1792”, Prose Studies, 18, pp. 171-187, p. 177.

20. VRW, p. 49.

21. LWE, p. 17.

22. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, pp. 74-75.

23. IR, p. 15, my emphasis.

24. This figure is based on the first 10,000 words.

25. VRW, p. 24, my emphasis.

26. LWE, pp. 26-28, my emphasis.

27. Laura Wright & Jonathan Hope (1996) Stylistics: A Practical Coursebook (London: Routledge), p. 4.

28. Emile Benveniste (1971) Problems in General Linguistics, trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press), p. 218.

29. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, pp. 173-178.

30. Monthly Review (1799), 29 n.s., p. 478.

31. Ibid.

32. LWE, pp. 84-85.

33. LWE, pp. 93-94.

34. Mary Hays (1798) Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, in Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson & J. Bell), pp. 61-62, my underlining.

35. Hays Appeal, “Advertisement to the Reader”, my underlining.

36. Advertisement to the second edition, titled Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799) (London: Printed by G. Woodfall). See the excellent website produced by Adriana Craciun, Anne Irmen Close, Megan Musgrave and Orianne Smith for a further discussion of the relationship between the two texts.

37. Monthly Review (1800), 31 n.s., p. 331.