SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “Becoming an Author: Mary Robinson's Memoirs and the Origins of Woman Artist's Autobiography.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 36-50. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Peterson asserts that Robinson's Memoirs was an attempt “to present herself as an authentic Romantic artist,” an attempt that was largely rejected by the reading public. According to Peterson, the work was also a deathbed effort to provide financial support for her daughter, who finished the work and published it after her mother's death.]

How does a woman become an author? Romantic mythologies of the male artist, with their emphasis on natural genius and superior literary taste, posit an organic development deriving from innate capacity; recent books by literary historians have, in contrast, stressed more practical nineteenth-century efforts to make authorship a legitimate profession, one equal to medicine and the law.¹ These books, as well as autobiographical studies of authorship, have only coincidentally touched on the Romantic female writer—in part because Romantic myths were specifically gendered to describe male artistry, in part because autobiographical accounts by women writers were few and far between until late in the nineteenth century.² Such accounts were few not just because women were socially discouraged from public self-display but also, I believe, because women writers were deeply ambivalent about the myths of authorship their male counterparts had created. Women were able to imagine their lives within the patterns of those myths, yet they were quick also to recognize the deviations in their experience that made the patterns inoperable or irrelevant.

In this regard, Mary Robinson's Memoirs is a historically pivotal and generically significant text: it allows us to trace the ambivalences of a Romantic woman writer who chose to author(ize) herself in and through autobiography. Published in 1801, one of the earliest of English artists' memoirs, it illustrates a woman writer's attempt to participate in Romantic myths of authorship and the difficulties of such participation; indeed, in its ambivalences, it contains the seeds of a very different autobiographical tradition that Robinson's Victorian successors chose instead to develop. To state my argument simply, I shall suggest that Mary Robinson tried, in her Memoirs and other autobiographical texts, to present herself as an authentic Romantic artist but that her readers, both her contemporaries and, more important, her female literary successors, rejected Robinson as their literary mother and also her autobiographical mode of self-presentation. Instead, most nineteenth-century women autobiographers embraced a version of female authorship that repressed assertions of genius, literary taste, and the poetic production of original knowledge and that accepted the woman writer as a being of lesser imagination and education who transmitted (masculine) knowledge within a private (feminine) sphere.

I. ROBINSON AS ROMANTIC ARTIST

For Robinson and her contemporaries, genius was a (perhaps the) prerequisite to becoming a writer. As Mary Jean Corbett sums it up, “the primary fiction about nineteenth-century authorship [was] that the man of genius is wholly his own product, an individual whose native abilities alone enable him to succeed” (Representing Femininity 18). In 1795, for example, in an Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, Issac D'Israeli described the true literary artist as one who possessed the “faculty of genius,” and he posited an international fellowship of writers who, “uninfluenced by the interests or the passions which give an impulse to the other classes of society, are connected by the secret links of congenial pursuits.”³ William Hazlitt put it more succinctly: “Professional Art is a contradiction in terms. Art is genius.”⁴

Robinson's Memoirs accepts this Romantic fiction and begins with a passage intended both to recall and illustrate her natural genius. The passage, a verbal painting of the Gothic ruins among which she was born (1-2),⁵ functions much like the opening section of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with its display of its young hero's facility with words. Robinson links her verbal facility, which tends toward the melancholic, not only to environment but also to physiology and physiognomy: she was born, she notes, with “singularly large” eyes and a face “exhibiting features marked with the most pensive and melancholy cast” (7); as soon as she could read, she took to “learning epitaphs and monumental inscriptions” and to reciting elegies like Pope's “Lines to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” and Mason's “Elegy on the Death of the Beautiful Countess of Coventry” (9). Robinson goes on to describe her early capacity for writing poetry while a student at Miss Lorrington's Chelsea academy and later at Oxford House, Marlyebone, and notes that these “juvenile compositions,” “written when I was between twelve and thirteen,” were eventually published in a “small volume” (23). And, while such personal recollections demonstrate her natural abilities, she is also careful to include more indisputable testimony: the opinion of her governess, Mrs. Hervey, that she possessed “an extraordinary genius for dramatic exhibitions” (30) and the “encomiums” of David Garrick, who, when he first heard her recite dramatic poetry, lavishly praised her “juvenile talents” (32).

What Robinson gives as evidence of youthful genius her daughter Maria, the compiler and editor of the Memoirs, amplifies with examples of mature poetic inspiration and production. Maria's examples focus on Mary Robinson as an improvisatrice—that is, a maker and reciter of spontaneous verses. The continental tradition of improvisation became known in England during the 1790s, and well known after the 1807 publication of Madame de Staël's Corinne.⁶ Reproducing both continental and English features of the inspired poet and anticipating de Staël's fiction, Maria Robinson recounts scenes in which her mother “poured forth those poetic effusions which have done so much honor to her genius and decked her tomb with unfading laurels” (204)—poems like “Lines to Him Who Will Understand Them,” in which Robinson bids farewell to Britain for Italia's shore; or “The Haunted Beach,” inspired by Robinson's discovery of a drowned stranger; or “The Maniac,” written, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, in a delirium excited by opium. Such improvisatore, in Maria's view, give “no less credit to the genius than to the heart of the author” (214).

For literary critics like Issac D'Israeli, genius was sufficient evidence to prove “literary character”: genius “can exist independent of education,” he argued, and “whenever this [genius] has been refused by nature, as it is so often, no theory of genius, neither habit nor education, have ever supplied its want” (Literary Character 28). But although D'Israeli was willing to minimize the importance of education, not all nineteenth-century theorists concurred; R. L. Edgeworth, father of the novelist Maria, argued in his Essays on Professional Education (1809) that theories of “peculiar genius” were too often the result of “the inaccuracy of common biography” and “ignorance of facts” and that the “natural genius” usually turns out to have had an excellent education (4-5).⁷ Most Romantic writers, irritated by the proliferation of hacks professing to be authors, similarly emphasized education as essential to the development of literary taste. Wordsworth, in the “Preface” to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), insists that an “accurate taste in poetry” can be acquired only “by thought and a continued intercourse with the best models of composition,” and it is no coincidence that he illustrates a key argument in the “Preface” not only by citing English writers but also by comparing two groups of Latin poets (Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius versus Statius and Claudian) to demonstrate his own familiarity with the “best models” (Woodring, ed., Prose of the Romantic Period 50, 67). It is no coincidence either that his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, includes long sections about his educational experiences at Hawkshead and Cambridge. Even if Wordsworth laments his lack of learning at Cambridge, his university experience, as Corbett tellingly points out, allowed him to be “integrated into a body of elites” (Representing Femininity 30).

In the early pages of her Memoirs Mary Robinson similarly stresses her superior literary education. As a young child, she attended Hannah More's Bristol academy, a fact she mentions for its intellectual cachet but declines to amplify for reasons I shall later suggest. After her family's move to London, she studied under Meribah Lorrington, an “extraordinary woman” whose “masculine education” included both “modern accomplishments” and “classical knowledge.” Lorrington knew “the Latin, French, and Italian languages,” as well as arithmetic, astronomy, and “the art of painting on silk” (21). Presumably Robinson received instruction in all these areas, for she depicts herself as Lorrington's protégé, claiming “All that I ever learned I acquired from this extraordinary woman” (22). The acquisition of “classical knowledge” (21) was particularly important, given that a lack of Latin and Greek often shut women out from legitimate authorship; as Nigel Cross explains, women's “utterly inadequate education” made them “female drudges” rather than authors (The Common Writer 164-68).⁸

Two narrative details in Robinson's account of her education are crucial in her adaptation of Romantic myths of authorship: (1) that she received a “masculine education” at Lorrington's academy; and (2) that, during her stay there, she began to write poetry. For Robinson the “masculine education”—that is, the training in classical languages and modern subjects women so rarely received—fulfills a prerequisite for writing poetry and, indeed, leads to her first literary productions, her “writing verses” and “composing rebuses” (23). This narrative association would seem to confirm the Romantic myth that genius complemented by education makes the poet; it also implies that a woman might, in certain fortunate circumstances, find herself becoming a poet too. Yet Robinson is deeply fearful of the effects of reproducing this masculine myth in real life, and her fear is registered in a biographical sketch of an “other” woman, Meribah Lorrington. After leaving Lorrington's academy, Robinson re-encounters her former governess, now given over to drink and “completely disfigured” (26); she can only shudder at the “horror” that this desexed woman represents. If we read the Lorrington episode as an instance of what Janice Carlisle has called “specular auto-biography,” as a piece of self-analysis in which the autobiographer uses an “other” to understand the self, then Lorrington embodies the negative effects of a masculine education, the loss of feminine virtues and even female form (John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character 223-59). Coming to authorship the masculine way may be a dangerous, ultimately self-annihilating course of action.

Given this fear, Robinson's account of her education introduces, consciously or unconsciously, an alternative myth of authorship, one more feminine than masculine in its literary associations. In this myth the special features of Lorrington's academy, not just the “masculine education” but the domestic arrangements, are crucial for producing a female poet. What Robinson describes is an academic institution in which an older, well-educated woman teaches, encourages, and inspires young girls in a life of literature. She notes that Meribah Lorrington “had only five or six pupils,” that she “called me her little friend,” that teacher and pupil shared “domestic and confidential affairs,” and that Lorrington's encouragement “after school hours” led Robinson to try writing poetry (22-23). What she suggests, in other words, is a modern version of Sappho's female academy, and it seems likely that Sappho's life—or, rather, contemporary myths of the great Greek poetess—influenced the shape of Robinson's Memoirs, at least in this account of her preparation to write poetry.⁹

In 1796 Robinson had published a volume of poetry, Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, and Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess.¹⁰ The Sappho Robinson imagines, like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sapphos, is a mature woman smitten by (heterosexual) love for a younger Phaon, a distinguished poet whose “lute neglected lies” because of an all-consuming, unrequited passion (Sonnet IV 42). Robinson's sonnet sequence can of course be read as an autobiographical fiction, as a thinly disguised account of her agonies over her loss of the Prince of Wales and fall from power (or, alternatively, over her later loss of Banastre Tarleton).¹¹ In the “Account of Sappho” that prefaces her sonnets, Robinson gives us a poetess much like herself: a woman of genius who “derived but little consequence from birth or connections” (21), who married and gave birth to a daughter, whose “genius” gave her fame but also “excited the envy of some writers who endeavoured to throw over her private character a shade” (22), but who nonetheless continued to her great poetry “for future ages” (26). Some of the details—of Sappho's marriage, motherhood, and fame—were standard features in eighteenth-century biographies of the Greek poetess, but the conjectures about Sappho's obscure birth and the envy of other poets are pure invention, suggestive of Robinson's desire to draw implicit parallels between Sappho's life and her own. She had been called, after all, “the ENGLISH SAPPHO.”¹²

More important for our purposes here, however, is to consider this biographical account as it delineates a pattern for becoming a poet(ess). Robinson, quoting Abbé Barthelemy, emphasizes the educative function of Sappho, the role of her academy in Greek culture and her personal role as an intellectual exemplar for Lesbian women: “Sappho undertook to inspire the Lesbian women with a taste for literature; many of them received instructions from her, and foreign women increased the number of her disciples” (28). Alas, Robinson laments in her “Preface,” Britain lacks such high respect for poetry and poetic genius. Not only is it “a national disgrace” that Britain should, “of all enlightened countries [be] the most neglectful of literary merit” (15-16), Robinson adds that Englishwomen of genius have particularly suffered because of lack of institutional support:

I cannot conclude these opinions without paying tribute to the talents of my illustrious countrywomen; who, unpatronized by courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble themselves by the imperishable lustre of MENTAL PRE-EMINENCE.

(16)

These critical comments, taken in conjunction with the biographical account, testify to Robinson's awareness that cultural conditions vary in their nurturing of poetic genius and that contemporary conditions work against Englishwomen who aspire to authorship. More positively, however, they underline a determination to create a viable myth of female artistry for herself and other women.

In this (re)creation, Robinson follows (or anticipates) her continental counterparts who, as Joan DeJean has shown, revivified the Sapphic myth for their own self-authorization.¹³ Sappho represents, for Robinson and other women poets, an ancient, original, and originating figure who fulfills the criteria for Romantic artistry yet adds specifically female features to the myths of becoming a poet.¹⁴ Sappho adds the possibility of female community and a female literary tradition. In the Memoirs, this possibility is hinted at, though never fully realized, in Lorrington's female academy and later in the literary circle that included Robinson, Lady Yea, and Mrs. Parry. Indeed, if Meribah Lorrington encouraged Mary Robinson to write poetry, it was the Duchess of Devonshire who encouraged her to publish; the “small volume” written “when I was between twelve and thirteen” (23) and published as the Poems of 1775 was the “neatly bound volume of my poems” to which the Duchess gave her approval.¹⁵

II. ROBINSON AS FEMALE ARTIST

If Sappho provided Robinson with an alternative myth for becoming an author, and if this myth was more enabling than terrifying, it nonetheless pointed to an (auto) biographical perplexity. In most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fictions of Sappho, the poet's love for Phaon was added to the biographical facts, and thus the question of love was added to the myth of female artistry.¹⁶ Did love enable and inspire the female poet, or did it silence her voice—“my Lyre neglected lies,” in Robinson's phrase?

One Romantic fiction—John Nott's Sappho: After a Greek Romance (1803)—associates passionate romantic love with the flowering of poetry.¹⁷ Nott's young Sappho exhibits the skills and inclinations of a poet, but not until she loses Phaon and experiences the despair of love does she produce genuine poetry. Nott calls love “the richest material for versification” (251), and his fictional biography sets the writing of Sappho's two great odes in Sicily, where Sappho has fled to recover Phaon and where she enjoys the company of other poets and philosophers who discuss the poetic tradition. In this myth of female artistry, the poet needs more than genius and education; she needs also to experience the pangs of love (if not the sexual act of love itself, about which Nott is prudishly silent).¹⁸

Robinson seems less certain about the alignment of romantic love and female artistry, more worried about a negative relation. In her 1796 Sappho and Phaon the female poet is already an artist before the sonnet sequence begins, and the loss of Phaon's love results in a loss of poetic voice:

Why, when I gaze on Phaon's beauteous eyes,
                    Why does each thought in wild disorder stray?
                    Why does each fainting faculty decay,
And my chill'd breast in throbbing tumults rise?
Mute, on the ground my Lyre neglected lies,
                    The Muse forgot, and lost the melting lay;
                    My down-cast looks, my faultering lips betray,
That stung by hopeless passion,—Sappho dies!

(“Sonnet IV” 42)

Robinson's sonnet, in large part a translation of Sappho's second ode, adds to the Sapphic myth what male poets never added: the possibility that erotic love might stifle poetic production. In other nineteenth-century redactions of this ode, most notably Swinburne's “Ode to Anactoria,” unrequited love becomes the means and occasion for the triumph of poetry. While Robinson's sonnet may be read (and dismissed) biographically as an inflated tribute to the Prince of Wales and the power of her love for him, it is more interesting as evidence of her uneasiness about assuming this alternative feminine myth of authorship. Love is a sticky wicket for the woman writer. She can imagine occasions, as in “Sonnets XIV” and “XV,” in which an “Aeolian harp” or “Grecian lyre” may accompany the joys of love, but love may as readily result, as in “Sonnets IV” and “XXXVI,” in a “Lyre neglected” or a “lost Lyre.”¹⁹

In the Memoirs Robinson retains this ambivalence about the influence of romantic love, tending to dissociate the plot of her affair with the Prince of Wales from her account of becoming a poet. One plot of the Memoirs traces a progress (or regress) in love; in it Robinson appears as a vulnerable woman—left unprotected by her father, unwittingly married to a London rake, exposed to the temptations of the stage, and then fondly charmed (and deceived) by the Prince of Wales. Robinson might have associated this traditional feminine plot with authorship, in that she turned to novel writing and journalism when the Prince abandoned her and refused to pay the £20,000 bond he owed her. (Indeed, one of her contemporaries, Laetitia Hawkins, gives just this explanation; after Robinson was deserted by the Prince and then Colonel Tarleton, Hawkins says: “She then took up a new life in London, became literary, brought up her daughter literary.”²⁰) Had Robinson made this narrative link, however, she would have aligned her Memoirs generically with the chroniques scandaleuses, thus suggesting that she was merely a hack writer who wrote for money and negating her claim to genuine artistry.

Instead, Robinson links authorship to a second feminine plot, that of the good mother and daughter who faithfully cares for her family.²¹ During her married lifetime, Robinson supported herself, her daughter Maria, her mother Mrs. Darby, sometimes her husband, sometimes a brother—first by acting, later by writing. Yet even though she describes her financial role in the Memoirs, she resists making economics the motivating force behind authorship. Well before she discusses economics, Robinson associates maternity with literary production. In an early episode in which an amorous suitor comes upon her unawares, she recalls:

In a small basket near my chair slept my little Maria; my table was spread with papers, and everything around me presented the mixed confusion of a study and a nursery.

(107)

This combination—book and child, study and nursery—gives cultural sanction to Robinson's literary work (even as it defends her against unwanted amours). It aligns biological and literary creation; it makes authorship seem as “natural” a role as motherhood.

Moreover, this passage anticipates what will become a dominant Victorian myth of female authorship, a myth developed in the biographical addendum to the Memoirs by Maria Robinson (a Victorian editor before her time if ever there was one). As Maria completes the story of her mother's life, she dates the “commencement of her [mother's] literary career” from 1788, the year they both returned to England from the continent (202).²² In 1788 Mrs. Robinson began not only to write but to nurse her daughter back to health:

Maternal solicitude for a beloved and only child now wholly engaged her attention; her assiduities were incessant and exemplary for the restoration of a being to whom she had given life, and to whom she was fondly devoted.

(203)

In the daughter's account, maternal devotion pays off in literary production—or perhaps literary production reactivates maternal conscience. As Maria states it, “the silence of the sick-chamber prov[ed] favourable to the muse” (204). Whatever the case, in editing her mother's life, Maria Robinson effects what the Memoirs only hint: that a safe, culturally viable myth of female artistry could be created by shifting the narrative focus from romantic to domestic love. Put another way, we might say that Maria foresaw the virtues of linking the artist's autobiography generically with the domestic memoir.

III. ROBINSON AND HER LITERARY SUCCESSORS

Robinson's Memoirs stands, in the English autobiographical tradition, as one of the first attempts to combine (masculine) myths of the Romantic artist with (feminine) versions of becoming a poet. Some second-generation Romantic poets—most notably Letitia Elizabeth Landon (known by her initials L. E. L.) and Felicia Hemans—continued to represent the female artist as a creature of genius, although they did so by aligning their work with Mme de Staël's illustrious Corinne rather than with Robinson's more dubious Memoirs.²³ Landon's poem “Sappho,” for example, derives its details—the improvisation of verse, the homage of the audience, the public ceremony of presenting Sappho with a laurel crown—from Book II of Corinne, not from Robinson's Sappho and Phaon or Memoirs (1859 Poetical Works 367-70). Most of Robinson's autobiographical successors, however, gave up Romantic claims to genius, superior literary production and taste, or the poet as the producer of original knowledge, instead acceding to the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres, with the woman writer occupying the private (and decidedly inferior) realm.

A key figure in this transition was Hannah More, the woman writer whose practical efforts in education first influenced Mary Robinson. As I mentioned earlier, Mary (then Darby) Robinson attended the celebrated Bristol academy run by the Misses More, a fact that she mentions early in the Memoirs (10-11). She says no more about Hannah More, however, even though both women came from respected Bristol families, both had close friendships with the actor and stage manager David Garrick, both achieved fame in the London theatre during the 1770s, and both retained ties with Bristol and its nearby summer resort, Clifton.²⁴ Robinson represses her knowledge of More, I think, because it is so inimical to her own views of female artistry. More's increasingly dominant evangelical tendencies would have set the elder woman against the more worldly Robinson, but it was More's opinions about female authorship that required real repression.²⁵

In Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, published in 1799, the year Robinson began writing her Memoirs, More chastised parents and teachers who encouraged female scribblers. She argued that young women should be given books that “exercise the reasoning faculties,” like Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding or Butler's Analogy of Religion, rather than light reading like novels. More's intention was not simply to develop the mental faculties of women; she also wanted to stop the proliferation of female novel-writers: “Who are those ever multiplying authors that with unparalleled fecundity are over-stocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny?” (Works [Harper and Brothers, 1854] 1: 345). More believed that reading novels resulted in writing novels, that the “easiness” of fictional production was “at once the cause of [its] own fruitfulness,” that “every raw girl, while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write” and triumphantly exclaim “And I too am an author!” (345). Robinson certainly was one of those “raw girls” who wanted to write and who, during the 1790s, produced the fictional “progeny” More so dreaded. Small wonder that Robinson acknowledged Meribah Lorrington rather than Hannah More as her literary mentor. More's educational philosophy insisted that women spend their time reading male authors rather than becoming authors themselves.

More important, More's views of women's intellectual and imaginative capacities were inhibiting to female writers like Robinson who aspired to genuine Romantic artistry. More believed in women's natural inferiority; as she states in her comparative summary of “the different capacities of the sexes”: “women have equal parts, but are inferior in wholeness of mind, in the integral understanding” (367). Even when More admits that women may possess genius, she chooses a classical myth to explain it away—not that of Sappho but of Atalanta. “Woman in the career of genius,” writes More, “is the Atalanta, who will risk losing the race by running out of her road to pick up the golden apple”; her male competitor “will more certainly attain his object, by direct pursuit, by being less exposed to the seductions of extraneous beauty” (367). The myth to which More alludes depicts Atalanta's loss of virginal freedom and her accession to marriage; it implies that women will, naturally and inevitably, succumb to their role as wives and mothers, thus giving up the possibility of becoming great artists. It is a myth directly in opposition to Robinson's vision of motherhood and authorship as mutually-enriching activities.

Most nineteenth-century autobiographical accounts after the Memoirs follow in the tradition of More rather than Robinson—not that they repeat or openly ascribe to the myth of Atlanta, but they accept woman's lesser literary capacities and her role within the domestic realm. As Robin Reed Davis has documented, Hannah More's example, both in life and in the hagiographic biographies published immediately after her death, influenced the self-conceptions of such popular women writers as Mrs. Sherwood, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and Charlotte Brontë (“Anglican Evangelicalism”). In Tonna's Personal Recollections (1841), for example, there are no Romantic claims to genius or superior literary taste. Rather, she is content to mark her entrance into authorship as an unforeseen act of providence. While alone on her husband's rural Irish estate, she receives a parcel of religious materials published by the Dublin Tract Society; the tracts inspire her to think, in an appropriate feminine mode, “Since I cannot give them money, may I not write something to be useful in the same way?” (27). And Tonna explicitly accepts her literary production as inferior intellectual work, noting that she subdued her pride to make her style readable by any five-year-old.²⁶ Like most of her female contemporaries, Tonna makes no claim to producing original knowledge, only to disseminating received wisdom to needy readers: children, the working-classes, and other women.

There was, of course, a compelling reason for assuming this secondary position: it gave women culturally sanctioned access to the literary marketplace. Valerie Sanders and Mary Jean Corbett have argued that nineteenth-century women writers adapted the form of the spiritual autobiography to stress its exemplary and imitative functions and that, in so doing, they legitimated the public work of authorship by treating it as an extension of the good work that women normally performed within the domestic sphere. In Corbett's formulation, “Christian discourse g[ave] the autobiographer authority over that domestic space, which [was] redefined as the new locus for cultural and even literary authority.” (“Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority” 15).²⁷ Put more cynically, we might say that Christian humility was a more palatable mode for women writers to adopt than Romantic self-aggrandizement.

The historical, social, and literary pressures that encouraged this new feminine mode of autobiography are too numerous to trace in this essay, but we may certainly point to one problem that most nineteenth-century women writers faced with Romantic myths of the artist: they depended on the artist's selling of himself. In presenting himself as a genius, with special knowledge and superior taste, the Romantic artist was offering himself, not just his books, to his reading public. Underlying Romantic myths of authorship, perhaps contributing to their formation, were the economic and social realities of aspiring to professional status. As Magali Sarfatti Larson explains, there is a difference between the work of a professional and a craftsman or laborer: “unlike craft or industrial labor … most professions produce intangible goods: the product, in other words, is only formally alienable and is inextricably bound to the person and personality of the producer” (The Rise of Professionalism 14). This association of product and producer was particularly troublesome for the female artist.

Robinson's life and Memoirs were far too implicated in the selling of the self to become a model for subsequent women writers, who worried far too much about the possible taint of entering the public sphere. Robinson had not only sold her face and body during her career as an actress, but she had also—more literally and transgressively—sold herself during her years as mistress to the Prince of Wales. Viewed from one perspective, her Memoirs were a final act of self-prostitution. In writing her autobiography, she was selling her “life” to make money—“making pennyworths of myself,” as Margaret Oliphant would later describe the public autobiographical act (Autobiography and Letters 75).

Not that Robinson would have agreed with this assessment. Given her alignment of motherhood and authorship, she would have viewed her Memoirs as a legacy to her daughter. Begun on her deathbed 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. Viewed more broadly, it was a model of the woman artist's autobiography, one showing her (literary) daughter(s) how to become an author. From this maternal perspective, the Memoirs is a confirmation of and testimony to Robinson's genuine female artistry, uncompromising in its insistence on genius and domestic solicitude.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Victor Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession; Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street; John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters; Patrick Parrinder, Authors and Authority: A Study of English Literary Criticism and Its Relation to Culture, 1750-1900; and J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters.

2. Cross includes one chapter, “The Female Drudge,” on women writers, and in its final chapters Marlon Ross's The Contours of Masculine Desire discusses such writers as Hannah More, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Felicia Hemans. Mary Jean Corbett's recent Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiography includes an excellent discussion of Romantic myths of the male artist, to which I am endebted, but her book considers no women's texts published before the 1840s. Neither does Julia Swindells's Victorian Writing and Working Women, which also begins with Victorian autobiographies—that is, texts written after the notion of separate spheres was firmly entrenched and thus after a separate tradition of women's autobiography had begun.

3. See also ch. I, “On the Literary Character” and ch. IV, “Of Natural Genius.” According to Corbett (Representing Femininity 27), D'Israeli's essay was much “read and admired by Scott, Moore, Byron, Rogers, and others.”

4. Quoted by David Bromwich in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic 119.

5. For this essay I have used the Grolier Society edition of the Memoirs, which reproduces the text of the original 1801 edition.

6. For a discussion of the continental tradition of improvisation and its use in Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807), see Ellen Moers, Literary Women 183-87.

7. If biographers knew more about “the early education of the subject of their memoirs,” Edgeworth believed, they might attribute less to “natural genius” (Essays 4-5).

8. Note that Robinson displays her knowledge of Latin in such volumes as Sappho and Phaon (1796), where she cites Ovid as well as his English translators; note, too, in that volume her emphasis on her writing of “legitimate” sonnets—that is, with Italian rather than English rhyme schemes—to display her literary knowledge and taste.

9. On this subject, see also Joel Haefner's essay in this volume.

10. My quotations come from the 1813 Minerva Press edition of Sappho and Phaon.

11. Stuart Curran's essay in this volume suggests that Sappho and Phaon was written as “a sonnet sequence à clef upon being deserted by Banastre Tarleton” (p. 21), but I think it as likely that Robinson had her greater loss of the Prince of Wales in mind. Although the date of the sequence, 1796, is closer to the end of her long affair with Tarleton, several details in the sonnets suggest the Prince of Wales: the younger age of Phaon (the Prince of Wales was only 17, Robinson over 21, when their affair began), the “smooth cheek” and “golden hair” of sonnet X (the Prince was fair-skinned and fair-haired, Tarleton dark), and the setting of the love scenes in sonnet XV on the banks of a stream or river (Robinson and the Prince had their first rendezvous on the banks of the Thames, on an island near Kew).

12. See the review of 14 October 1794 in the Morning Post, quoted by Curran.

13. See Joan De Jean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937, especially the “Introduction,” 1-28, and Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, especially ch. 3, “Sappho Descending,” 57-96.

14. Of course, male poets also used Sappho's poetry as an initiatory vehicle. De Jean posits a triangulation of desire in which young male poets compete for recognition and priority by translating Sappho's lyrics and thus taking possession of her voice. Female versions of Sappho tend, in contrast, to trace “the origin of women's poetry to shared female experience” (39). On the differences between “masculine” and “feminine” modes of influence, see Leslie Brisman's “Maud: The Feminine as the Crux of Influence,” in which “masculine” modes are associated with force, aggression, explosiveness, acquisitiveness, and institution, and “feminine” with balance, responsiveness, perseverance, the accumulative, and community.

15. Robinson lost access to the literary circle surrounding the Duchess of Devonshire after her affair with the Prince of Wales became public.

16. This spurious biographical episode was added largely on the evidence of Ovid's Heroides, although writers like John Nott claimed they found evidence for it on the island of Lesbos.

17. Nott was a physician and classical scholar whose publications include medical treatises on thermal hot springs and translations of Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry. It is possible that he knew Mary Robinson, given that he resided and practiced medicine in the Bristol area from 1793 until his death in 1825.

18. Nott suggests that Sappho remains a virgin, neither consummating her love for Phaon nor engaging in any sapphic relations (about which Nott expresses only disgust). On the rumors of sapphic relations, see pp. 256-57.

19. There is also the possibility that Robinson fears openly embracing a Sapphic myth of authorship, given the sapphic implications. Robinson seems to be aware of the linguistic and sexual ambiguities of the second ode, for in her biographical “Account of Sappho,” she denies that Sappho would have produced “any composition which might tend to tarnish her reputation” (26).

20. From Laetitia Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions 2: 33-34. For a fascinating discussion of the financial aspects of Robinson's literary career, see Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820.”

21. I have written more fully about the conjunction of these feminine plots in “Female Autobiographer, Narrative Duplicity.”

22. Maria gives the date as 1787, but the chronological sequence makes it clear that they arrived back in England at the beginning of 1788.

23. See the chapter “Performing Heroinism: The Myth of Corinne” in Moers, Literary Women 173-210. For the most widely read English translation of Corinne (1833), Letitia Landon translated the improvisations that appear throughout the novel into verse; Felicia Hemans noted that the novel had “a power over me which is quite indescribable; some passages seem to give me back my own thoughts and feelings, my whole inner being, with a mirror more true than ever friend could hold up” (quoted in Moers 177).

24. For details about More's life, see Mary Alden Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle, and M. G. Jones, Hannah More. Jones notes that “the lovely and unfortunate Perdita” attended the Mores' academy and that “her reputation was, later, used as a stick wherewith to beat Miss More” (9, 238, n. 19).

25. An anonymous nineteenth-century retelling of Robinson's life, “Our Old Actors: ‘Perdita,’” Temple Bar 51 (1877), 536-48, speculates that “even so rigid a moralist as Hannah More could not condemn her,” but I think this anonymous journalist fails to recognize how seriously More would have objected to Robinson's literary deeds.

26. “If, on reading a manuscript to a child of five years old, I found there was a single sentence or word above his comprehension, it was instantly corrected to suit that lowly standard [of homely simplicity]” (Personal Recollections 179).

27. See also Valerie Sanders, “‘Absolutely an act of duty’: Choice of Profession in Autobiographies by Victorian Women.”

Bibliography

Primary Works

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. Bristol: Longman, 1798.

De Staël, Germaine. Corinne, or Italy. 1807. Tr. and ed. Avriel H. Goldberger. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

D'Israeli, Issac. The Literary Character; or the History of Men of Genius Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions. 5th ed. London: Edward Moxon, 1839.

Edgeworth, Richard L. Essays on Professional Education. London: J. Johnson, 1809.

Hawkins, Laetitia. Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions London: Longman, 1824.

More, Hannah. The Complete Works. 7 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835, 1854.

———. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. 2 vols. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799. New York: Garland Press, 1974.

[Nott, John.] Sappho: After a Greek Romance. London: Cutbell and Martin, 1803.

Oliphant, Margaret. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M.O.W. Oliphant. Ed. Mrs. Harry Coghill. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899.

Robinson, Mary. Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. London: Wilks and Taylor, 1801. Reprinted London: Grolier Society, n.d.

———. Sappho and Phaon. In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets. London: privately printed, 1796. London: Minerva Press, 1813.

Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Personal Recollections. 4th ed. London: Seeleys, 1854.

Woodring, Carl R., ed. Prose of the Romantic Period. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.

———. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1989.

Secondary Works

Bonham-Carter, Victor. Authors by Profession. 2 vols. London: Society of Authors, 1978.

Brisman, Leslie. “Maud: The Feminine as the Crux of Influence.” Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992): 21-43.

Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Carlisle, Janice. John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Corbett, Mary Jean. “Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority in Victorian Women Writers' Autobiographies.” Women's Studies 18 (1990): 13-29.

———. Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

DeJean, Joan. Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Fergus, Jan and Janice Farrar Thaddeus. “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 191-207.

Gross, John J. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Hopkins, Mary Alden. Hannah More and Her Circle. New York: Longmans, Green, 1947.

Jones, M. G. Hannah More. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952.

Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Lipking, Lawrence. Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. 1963. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977.

“Our Old Actors: ‘Perdita.’” Temple Bar 51 (1877): 536-48.

Parrinder, Patrick. Authors and Authority: A Study of English Literary Criticism and Its Relation to Culture, 1750-1900. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.

Peterson, Linda H. “Female Autobiographer, Narrative Duplicity.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1990): 165-76.

Ross, Marlon. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Sanders, Valerie. “‘Absolutely an act of duty’: Choice of Profession in Autobiographies by Victorian Women.” Prose Studies 9 (1986): 54-70.

Saunders, J. W. The Profession of English Letters. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

Swindells, Julia. Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.