[In the following essay, Levy explores Coleridge's relationship to Mary Robinson and considers why he showed her Kubla Khan before it was published. The critic examines both authors' use of opium as a possible reason for Robinson's early familiarity with the poem.]

One of the enduring mysteries of Coleridge scholarship is the nature of Mary Robinson's connection with Kubla Khan. Scholars have long known that it is in her ode ‘Mrs Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’ that we find the first published references to the poem but they do not know why he allowed her to see it.¹ Even Elisabeth Schneider, who published a virtually encyclopaedic study of the poem in 1953 in which Robinson was several times mentioned, did not address the problem of purpose. Though, as we shall see, she did hint at ‘some stronger link’ binding a story she read in Mrs Robinson's Memoirs to Coleridge's famous preface of 1816, she did not take the matter further.²

Although the beginnings of Coleridge's relationship with Mary Robinson (1758?-1800) can plausibly be traced back to the mid 1790s, it is not until January 1800 that they can be said to have become properly acquainted.³ During that month he was at least twice in her company, on both occasions with Godwin who may well have introduced them.⁴ He had arrived in London during late November 1799 in order to take up a staff position on the Morning Post to which Robinson was a regular contributor. His task was, chiefly, to provide articles on political subjects while Robinson, who was widely known as a writer and socialite, filled Southey's old job of chief contributor of poems. On 25 January 1800 he sent a letter to Southey praising her as a woman of ‘undoubted Genius’ and enclosing the first of two poems which she would eventually give him for the second volume of the Annual Anthology: ‘She overloads every thing;’ he wrote, in reference to a poem published in that day's paper, ‘but I never knew a human Being with so full a mind—bad, good, & indifferent, I grant you, but full, & overflowing’.⁵

At this time Robinson was living in a house in South Audley Street and struggling to keep up appearances. Having long outgrown the limitations of her best-known real-life role of ‘Perdita’ to the Prince of Wales's ‘Florizel’, she had established herself as an exceptionally industrious poet and novelist. Since 1792, she had published seven novels including Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity and the highly autobiographical The Natural Daughter. She had contributed regularly to the World, the Morning Post and the Oracle, and written the occasional pamphlet. Among her closest friends were Samuel Jackson Pratt and the satirist ‘Peter Pindar’. She also knew many close friends of Godwin including Mary Hays, John Opie and John and Eliza Fenwick. Following what appears to have been a bungled miscarriage in 1783, she had gradually lost the use of her legs so that by the time Coleridge met her she was to all intents and purposes a cripple. She took opium as an analgesic and in order to combat depression and anxiety.

On an artistic level, Coleridge was particularly impressed by her metrical skills, for, like Southey, she was able to produce large quantities of accessible verse often of some technical competence. During late February, for instance, she introduced a new metre in a poem entitled ‘The Haunted Beach’ which so impressed him that he wrote to Southey: ‘Ay! that Woman has an Ear’.⁶ He seems also, if we are to believe a letter he sent to her daughter Maria Elizabeth Robinson in 1802, to have believed that he could offer her some kind of religious consolation: ‘[I was] thrice happy,’ he wrote, ‘if I could have soothed her sorrows, or if the feeble Lamp of my Friendship could have yielded her one ray of Hope & Guidance’.⁷

For her part, Robinson clearly admired Coleridge both as an intellectual and as a poet. She had a weakness for intellectuals of all kinds but especially those like Coleridge who could combine their keen intelligence with poetry or some other form of creative activity. During the spring and summer of 1800 she so admired Lyrical Ballads that she put together a collection of Lyrical Tales, mostly from poems already published in the Morning Post or the Monthly Magazine, using the same typography and the same press at Bristol. Possibly Coleridge advised on their arrangement for when the volume appeared, during late November, the longest poem in the collection, a ‘Gothic Swiss’ tale of five sections called ‘Golfre’ was placed not at the front of the volume like ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, but at the back where neither its length nor any other perceived difficulty would be likely to discourage potential readers. For a while, the title, coupled with the choice of press (Cottle's) and publisher (it was to be published by Longman) led Wordsworth to consider changing the title of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads to ‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’.⁸ However, as is well-known, he went ahead with the old title anyway, doubtless trusting Robinson's volume to sink quickly into oblivion.

Following a further meeting, noted by Godwin, when he and Coleridge supped with Robinson on 22 February we do not know of any other occasions when they met together.⁹ However, as she is known to have met Sara Coleridge, who was not present at any of these meetings, at about this time, there may well have been other occasions.¹⁰ They could have met at the offices of the Morning Post or at the homes of mutual acquaintances such as the Post's editor Daniel Stuart, the publisher Richard Phillips, or at Longman's. Certainly, the world of London's literary culture was small enough for there to be frequent contact.

On 2 April Coleridge left London for the Lake district, spending time at Grasmere, Bristol and Nether Stowey, before returning to Grasmere and then, on 24 July, settling down at Keswick. He did not forget Robinson however for he left her the sole manuscript of his play Osorio which he asked her to hand on to Godwin. Although they did not make plans to correspond he remained keenly interested in her welfare, discussing, for instance, her illness at Bristol with Humphrey Davy. When, on 21 May, he wrote to Godwin, he asked to be remembered to her in ‘the kindest & most respectful phrases’ adding:

I wish, I knew the particulars of her complaint. For Davy has discovered a perfectly new Acid, by which he has restored the use of limbs to persons who had lost them for many years, (one woman 9 years) in cases of supposed Rheumatism. At all events, Davy says, it can do no harm, in Mrs Robinson's case—& if she will try it, he will make up a little parcel & write her a letter of instructions &c.—

Then, he wrote, ‘Tell her, & it is the truth, that Davy is exceedingly delighted with the two Poems in the Anthology.—N.B. Did you get my Attempt of a Tragedy from Mrs Robinson?—’.¹¹

Probably sometime during August he also invited her to stay with the family at Keswick, for she wrote to Pratt on 31 August mentioning that she had some plans of making ‘an hasty journey to visit Coleridge, the Poet, and his amiable little wife, in Cumberland’.¹² Ill health however precluded the opportunity and instead she passed the summer at a cottage ornée she shared with her daughter at Englefield Green near Windsor. In any case, it is difficult to see how she would have found the time, as in addition to her commitments to the Morning Post, she was working flat out for Phillips, producing short biographies, a translation of Hagar's Picture of Palermo and a series of articles on the ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, &c. of the Metropolis of England’. The latter however did give her the opportunity of flattering her friends, and on 1 August she published an article describing Coleridge as ‘the exquisite poet’.¹³

In the meantime Coleridge experienced at Keswick a long period of intense physical discomfort coupled with a highly charged sense of the wildness of the Cumberland landscape. He complained repeatedly of swollen eyelids and of rheumatic pains, which may have been at least in part psychosomatic. In rapturous, if repetitive terms, he wrote to various friends describing the view from his house Greta Hall, with Skiddaw rising at its back ‘the Lake of Bassenthwaite, with its simple and majestic case of mountains, on my right hand; on my left, and stretching far away into the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, the Lake of Derwent—water; straight before me a whole camp of giants' tents,—or is it an ocean rushing in, in billows that, even in the serene sky, reach halfway to heaven?’.¹⁴ He battled too with his writers' block, struggling to complete Christabel. Only during October do we hear more of their relationship when following a letter to Daniel Stuart on 7 October, in which he spoke of his grief on hearing of ‘poor Mrs Robinson's illness’, a flurry of poems appeared in the Morning Post with Robinsonian connections.¹⁵

Of these poems: ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’, ‘The Voice from the Side of Etna; or, The Mad Monk. An Ode, in Mrs. Ratcliffe's Manner;’ ‘The Solitude of Binnorie, or the Seven Daughters of Lord Archibald Campbell. A Poem’ and ‘Ode, Inscribed to the Infant Son of S.T. Coleridge, Esq. Born Sept. 14, at Keswick, in Cumberland’ only one ‘The Mad Monk’ has any claim to be entirely by Coleridge; Robinson wrote the poem inscribed to Derwent Coleridge while the other two, bar the title and perhaps one or two lines of the ‘Sappho’ poem, were written entirely by Wordsworth. They were however almost certainly sent in by Coleridge who wanted help fulfilling his commitments.

To take the poems one by one: ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’ was written by Wordsworth. Described by him as not worth a farthing, it is only remarkable for its frank lesbian content. Coleridge probably gave it the title of ‘Alcaeus to Sappho’ because ‘Sappho’ was one of Robinson's pseudonyms and because both poets were famous metrists.¹⁶ It was not published by Stuart until 24 November.

The chief argument so far adduced for ‘The Mad Monk’ as being a poem by Coleridge is that an expanded version of it was subsequently published under Coleridge's name in an anthology of poems edited by Robinson's daughter called The Wild Wreath in 1804, whereas when it appeared in the Post on 13 October it was under the pseudonym of ‘Cassiani jun.’¹⁷ Set on Mount Etna, it describes, partly in ‘melody most like to old Sicilian song;’ an hermit's affection for his murdered Rosa—a figure in a famous mediaeval Sicilian love poem by Cielo d'Alcambo. As Robinson was about to publish The Picture of Palermo which reproduced d'Alcambo's poem one might well wonder if she had given him advance notification or an advance copy. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain either the Sicilian locale or the significance of the name.¹⁸

The connection of Wordsworth's ‘The Solitude of Binnorie’ with Robinson stems from the fact that the metre derives from ‘The Haunted Beach’. This was made quite clear in an introduction appended to the poem when it appeared on 14 October:

Sir,

It would be unpardonable in the author of the following lines, if he omitted to acknowledge that the metre (with the exception of the burthen) is borrowed from “The Haunted Beach of Mrs. robinson”; a most exquisite Poem, first given to the public, if I recollect aright, in your paper, and since re-published in the second volume of Mr. southey's Annual Anthology. This acknowledgment will not appear superfluous to those who have felt the bewitching effect of that absolutely original stanza in the original Poem, and who call to mind that the invention of a metre has so widely diffused the name of Sappho, and almost constitutes the present celebrity of Alcaeus.

The introduction was signed with the initials ‘M. H.’ which one writer has suggested may stand for ‘Mountain Hermit’, a not unlikely possibility as so many of the poems with Coleridge/Robinson connections do indeed have mountain and hermit associations.¹⁹ Wordsworth probably wrote the poem sometime between 31 July 1800, when Coleridge brought a copy of the Anthology to Grasmere, and 17 August, when he read a version of it to Dorothy.²⁰ There is however no evidence that Robinson suspected his authorship; most likely she thought it a further contribution by Coleridge.

Her own ‘Ode, Inscribed to the Infant Son of S.T. Coleridge, Esq.’ appeared on 17 October, apparently five days after its composition and slightly more than a month after Derwent's birth. Appearing so shortly after ‘The Mad Monk’ and ‘The Solitude of Binnorie’ one must suspect that it was meant as some kind of reciprocal contribution. Possibly Stuart had forewarned her that the poems were about to appear, thus giving her the idea of putting together a poem for Derwent. Perhaps the most interesting section is the final part where she briefly describes her predicament, a ‘stranger’ on the edge of Windsor Forest, and shows herself more or less familiar with the topography of the Keswick area:

sweet boy! accept a stranger's song,
                    Who joys to sing of thee,
lone her forest haunts among,
                    The haunts of wild-wood harmony!
A stranger's song by falsehood undefil'd,
Hymns thee, o! inspiration's darling child!
In thee it hails the genius of thy sire,
Her sad heart sighing o'er her feeble lyre,
And, whether on the breezy height,
Where Skiddaw greets the dawn of light
Ere the rude sons of labour homage pay
To summer's flaming eye, or winter's banner grey;
Whether by bland religion early taught,
To track the devious pilgrimage of thought;
Or borne on fancy's variegated wing,
                    A willing vot'ry to that shrine,
Where art and science all their flow'rs shall bring,
                    Thy temples to entwine:
Whether lodore for thee its white wave flings,
The brawling herald of a thousand springs;
Whether smooth basenthwaite, at eve's still hour
                    Reflects the young moon's crescent meekly pale,
Or meditation seeks her silent bow'r
                    Amid the rocks of lonely borrowdale;
Still may thy fame survive, sweet boy, till time
Shall bend to keswick's vale thy skiddaw's brow sublime.

Also, apparently during October Robinson wrote, perhaps the best known of her poems at least as far as Coleridge scholars are concerned, her ‘Mrs. Robinson to the Poet Coleridge’. This poem shows that she was clearly acquainted with ‘Kubla Khan’ far earlier than most other writers. It first appeared during July 1801 in the fourth volume of her posthumous Memoirs, edited by her daughter, where it sits uncomfortably amongst more than a score of ‘Tributary Lines addressed to Mrs. Robinson, during her Lifetime, by Different Friends, with her Answers’. There it's signed ‘Sappho’ and given the date of ‘Oct.1800’. Presumably she sent a version of it to Coleridge, for it seems to have elicited from him, apparently during November, a response entitled ‘A Stranger Minstrel. By S.T. Coleridge, Esq. Written to Mrs. Robinson a few Weeks before her Death’.

Before looking at the poem, it's worth addressing the question as to why Coleridge allowed her to see Kubla Khan in the first place. After all, it was not essential to any interchange of compliments that she should see it nor was it a poem that he was otherwise inclined to let people read. I think that most of the answer must lie in the fact that she too was a poet manifestly interested in the effects of opium.

Although the evidence for Robinson's use of opium is necessarily patchy, the evidence we do have would suggest that during the 1790s she was a pretty regular user. As we have seen, since 1783 she had been suffering from a painful paralytic complaint while she also experienced continual trouble with what might best be described as nerves. Indeed, as a writer and as a woman who had been more tenderly educated than most, she saw herself as a martyr to her feelings;—one of the chief characteristics of her work is the continually reiterated complaint that she was suffering from a wealth of present ills and from the accumulated miseries of the past. It was this which led her not just to use the drug as an analgesic but also as a tranquillizer in order to keep unpleasant thoughts and memories at bay.

The earliest documented occasion on which she is known to have taken opium was during the summer of 1791 when she was staying at 10 North Parade in Bath. She'd gone there in order to seek relief from her illness, floating, in the words of her Della Cruscan friend James Boaden ‘in the fragrance of the rubied rose’.²¹ Apparently, having been taken with the sight of an ‘unfortunate Maniac’ called ‘mad Jemmy’ who haunted the streets between the Pump Room and her house, she would often wait ‘whole hours’ for his appearance gazing upon his ‘venerable but emaciated countenance with sensations of awe almost reverential’. On one occasion however:

Having suffered for her disorder more than usual pain, she swallowed by order of her physician, near eighty drops of laudanum. Having slept for some hours, She awoke, and, calling her daughter, desired her to take a pen and write what she should dictate. Miss Robinson, supposing that a request so unusual might proceed from the delirium excited by the opium, endeavoured in vain to dissuade her mother from her purpose. The spirit of inspiration was not to be subdued, and she repeated, throughout, the admirable poem to The Maniac, much faster than it could be committed to paper.

She lay, while dictating, with her eyes closed, apparently in the stupor which opium frequently produces, repeating like a person talking in her sleep. This affecting performance, produced in circumstances so singular, does no less credit to the genius than to the heart of the author.

On the ensuing morning Mrs. Robinson had only a confused idea of what had past (sic), nor could be convinced of the fact till the manuscript was produced. She declared, that she had been dreaming of mad Jemmy throughout the night, but was perfectly unconscious of having been awake while she composed the poem, or of the circumstances narrated by her daughter.²²

Whether or not this anecdote had any powerful influence on Coleridge's own accounts of the origin of Kubla Khan is not a question that can be easily decided. Certainly there are similarities, with the 1816 preface especially (for instance, the sound of Coleridge's sentence: ‘On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, …’ would seem to recall the lines in the Memoirs: ‘On the ensuing morning Mrs. Robinson had only a confused idea of what had past, …’), yet the underlying intention was different. As Elisabeth Schneider has remarked, the anecdote in the Memoirs was introduced as an ‘example of the facility and rapidity’ with which Robinson composed whereas Coleridge of course wrote his accounts in order to elucidate his poem.²³

Other material which provides strong evidence for Robinson's interest in opium can be easily found, where so far scholars have failed to look, among the plentiful pages of her poems. Sometime between the years 1798 and 1800, for instance, she added the following lines to a poem of 1792 written in order to celebrate the recovery of her daughter from an inoculation:

Nor in these alone I find
Charms to heal the wounded mind;
From the poppy I have ta'en
Mortal's balm, and mortal's bane!
Juice, that, creeping through the heart,
Deadens ev'ry sense of smart;
Doom'd to heal, or doom'd to kill;
Fraught with good, or fraught with ill.
this I stole, when witches fell,
Busy o'er a murd'rous spell,
On the dark and barren plain,
Echo'd back the night-owl's strain!
While the winking stars withdrew,
Shock'd, their horrid rites to view!(24)

While in the Morning Post on 1 July 1800 she published these lines from a poem called ‘Ode to Apathy’ which actually described the physical effects of the drug:

Thy poppy wreath shall bind my brows,
                    Dead'ning the sense of pain;
And while to thee I pay my vows,
                    A chilling tide shall rush thro' ev'ry vein,
Pervade my heart, and ev'ry care beguile,
While my wan cheek shall bear the vacant smile.

Most remarkable of all however were these lines she published on the drug's effect on the creative imagination which appeared in the same paper on 6 September 1800 in a poem entitled ‘The Poet's Garret’:

                                                                                                                                                      On a shelf—
(Yclept a mantle-piece), a phial stands,
Half-fill'd with potent spirits!—spirits strong,
Which sometimes haunt the poet's restless brain,
And fill his mind with fancies whimsical.
Poor Poet! happy art thou, thus remov'd
From pride and folly!—for in thy domain
Thou canst command thy subjects;—fill thy lines—
Wield the all-conq'ring weapon heav'n bestows
In the grey goose's wing! which, tow'ring high
Bears thy rich fancy to immortal fame!(25)

Although we can't be entirely certain that Coleridge read any of these poems, taken together with other evidence we've looked at, it doesn't seem unlikely. As a contributor himself to the Morning Post we know that he would have received copies from Stuart.

Turning now to consider Robinson's poem, the first point that needs to be made is that she appears to accept that Kubla Khan was indeed a poem composed in a ‘profound sleep’ (1816) or a ‘sort of reverie’.²⁶ Not only does she begin her poem with the lines: ‘Rapt in the visionary theme! / spirit divine with thee I'll wander!’ but she concludes it with a phrase describing Kubla Khan as an ‘airy’ dream—thus providing firm evidence that, whatever the truth about the date of the poem, the story that it emerged from the world of dreams was current reasonably early.

Secondly, that to her at least, if not to Coleridge, the poem was patently a new production. On three occasions she uses the phrase ‘new paradise’ to describe Xanadu.

Thirdly, that Kubla's ‘sunny Pleasure-Dome’ was to her a gorgeous auric building: ‘studd'd o'er / With all peruvia's lust'rous store!’.

Fourthly, that to some extent she identified herself with the injunction towards the end of the poem to ‘Weave a circle round him [Coleridge?] thrice’:

And now I'll pause to catch the moan
                    Of distant breezes, cavern-pent;
Now, ere the twilight tints are flown,
Purpling the landscape, far and wide,
On the dark promontory's side
                    I'll gather wild-flow'rs, dew besprent,
And weave a crown for thee,
genius of heav'n-taught poesy!

And fifthly, that to her Coleridge's ‘Abyssinian Maid’, whose ‘Symphony and Song’ he wants so desperately to revive within himself, had already succeeded in inspiring him to create, the product of the dream itself being evidence:

                              I hear her voice! thy “sunny dome,”
Thy “caves of ice,” aloud repeat,
Vibrations, madd'ning sweet!
                              Calling the visionary wand'rer home.
She sings of thee, O! favour'd child
Of minstrelsy, sublimely wild!
Of thee, whose soul can feel the tone
Which gives to airy dreams a magic of thy own!

Coleridge's putative response to Robinson's poem also appeared in the fourth volume of the Memoirs²⁷. It's a poem which, like ‘The Mad Monk’, includes a great deal of mountainous scenery, though here the site is not Etna but Skiddaw. Essentially, it's an invitation in verse, couched in visionary terms, imploring her to leave Englefield Green for Greta Hall:

As late on Skiddaw I lay supine
Midway th'ascent, in that repose divine,
When the soul, centr'd in the heart's recess,
Hath quaff'd its fill of Nature's loveliness,
Yet still beside the fountain's marge will stay,
                                   And fain would thirst again, again to quaff;—
Then, when the tear, slow travelling on its way,
                                   Fills up the wrinkle of a silent laugh,
In that sweet mood of sad and humorous thought—
A form within me rose, within me wrought
With such strong magic, that I cry'd aloud,
Thou ancient skiddaw! by thy helm of cloud,
And by thy many-colour'd chasms so deep;
And by their shadows, that for ever sleep;
By yon small flaky mists, that love to creep
Along the edges of those spots of light,
Those sunshine islands on thy smooth green height;
                                   And by yon shepherds with their sheep,
                                   And dogs and boys, a gladsome crowd,
                                   That rush even now with clamour loud
                                   Sudden from forth thy topmost cloud;
                                   And by this laugh, and by this tear,
                                   I would, old Skiddaw! she were here!

One point of mild interest is that Coleridge used the poem to mention the two Robinson poems in the Anthology, quoting the title of ‘The Haunted Beach’ and a favourite line: “‘Pale moon, thou spectre of the sky!’” from ‘Jasper’.

During Robinson's final weeks, when she knew that she was dying, she wrote to Coleridge expressing what she called her ‘death bed affection & esteem’ for him. Although their personal acquaintance had been short, it had certainly been long enough for her to think of him with genuine affection. Part of her letter he quoted in a letter to Tom Poole on 1 February 1801, a little more than a month after her death on Boxing Day 1800.

My little Cottage is retired and comfortable.

There I mean to remain (if indeed I live so long) till Christmas. But it is not surrounded with the romantic Scenery of your chosen retreat: it is not, my dear Sir! the nursery of sublime Thoughts—the abode of Peace—the solitude of Nature's Wonders. O! Skiddaw!—I think, if I could but once contemplate thy Summit, I should never quit the Prospect it would present till my eyes were closed for ever!

‘O Poole!’, wrote Coleridge, ‘that that Woman had but been married to a noble Being, what a noble Being she herself would have been. Latterly, she felt this with a poignant anguish.—Well!—

O'er her pil'd grave the gale of evening sighs;
And flowers will grow upon it's grassy Slope.
I wipe the dimming Water from mine eyes—
Ev'n in the cold Grave dwells the Cherub Hope!

Notes

1. Memoirs of the late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With some posthumous Pieces, edited by Maria Elizabeth Robinson, 4 vols (London, 1801), IV, 145-149.

2. Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan, (Chicago, 1953), p. 216.

3. The best discussion of the Coleridge/Robinson relationship during this period can be found in an article by David V. Erdman, ‘Lost Poem Found. The cooperative pursuit & recapture of an escaped Coleridge “sonnet” of 72 lines’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXV (1961), 249-268.

4. Bodleian Library, Abinger Manuscripts, Godwin's Journal, 15 and 18 January 1800, Dep.e204.

5. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford, 1956-71), I, 562.

6. Coleridge Letters, I, 576.

7. Coleridge Letters, I, 904. On the question of whether or not Coleridge and Robinson discussed their religious beliefs see Godwin's letter to Robinson, 4 September 1800, where he writes: ‘God (the God of Coleridge & Spinoza) bless you both [Robinson and her daughter]’. Abinger, Dep. b227/8.

8. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years: 1787-1805, edited by E. de Selincourt; second edition, revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967), p. 297. See also Coleridge Letters, I, 620-621.

9. Abinger, Godwin's Journal, Dep.e204.

10. See below, 12.

11. Coleridge Letters, I, 589.

12. Robinson to S. J. Pratt, 31 August 1800, Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, edited by K. N. Cameron, later D. H. Reiman, (Cambridge, Mass., 1961-), I, 232.

13. Monthly Magazine, X (1800), 35.

14. Coleridge to James Webbe Tobin, 25 July 1800, Coleridge Letters, I, 612-613.

15. Coleridge Letters, I, 629.

16. Following the publication of her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, and Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess (London, 1796), Robinson was often referred to as the ‘English Sappho’. During 1800 she adopted it as one of her regular pseudonyms.

17. For a discussion of the authorship of ‘The Mad Monk’ see Stephen Parrish and David Erdman, ‘Who wrote The Mad Monk?’, BNYPL [Bulletin of the New York Public Library], LXIV (1960), 209-237.

18. Possibly a version of it appeared under Coleridge's name in The Wild Wreath as a kind of quid pro quo for Maria Elizabeth Robinson agreeing to drop Coleridge's ‘A Stranger Minstrel’ from the 1803 edition of the Memoirs. He certainly objected to its inclusion in the 1801 edition, going so far as to describe it as an ‘excessively silly copy of Verses’. See Coleridge Letters, II, 904.

19. Carol Landon, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Morning Post: An Early Version of “The Seven Sisters”’, Review of English Studies, XI (1960), 392-402 (p. 397).

20. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by Mary Moorman, second edition (Oxford, 1981), 32, 34.

21. ‘To Mrs. Robinson, on her visiting Bath, in Ill-Health’, Memoirs, IV, 14. A version of the poem first appeared in the Oracle, 8 June 1791, under Boaden's regular pseudonym of ‘Arno’.

22. Memoirs, II, 131-132. The original of this poem was almost certainly published in the Oracle, during September 1791 where it was given the title of ‘Insanity’. As ‘The Maniac’, it appeared in Robinson's Poems (London, 1793) and The Poetical Works of the late Mrs. Mary Robinson: Including many Pieces never before Published, edited by Maria Elizabeth Robinson, 3 vols (London, 1806), II. It has been described by Alethea Hayter (Opium and the Romantic Imagination, revised edition (London, 1988), p. 292) as ‘no masterpiece …, though there is one interesting stanza … which contains the ideas of watching eyes, of cold, of petrifaction, so often found in opium dreams’.

23. Schneider, p. 87. The quotation is from the Memoirs, II, 129.

24. Originally published in the Oracle, 15 March 1792, under the title of ‘Invocation’. Poetical Works, II, 52-53.

25. Significantly, between 1804, when it was republished in The Wild Wreath, and 1806, when it appeared in the Poetical Works, the final line was changed to read ‘Bears thy sick fancy to immortal fame’. Either Maria Elizabeth had two versions of the poem or she made this alteration herself.

26. Quoted from the ‘Crewe Manuscript’ reproduced by John Shelton, ‘The Autograph Manuscript of “Kubla Khan” and an Interpretation’, A Review of English Literature, VII (1966), 32-42. All of my quotations of Coleridge's poem are drawn from this version, with the exception of the name ‘Kubla Khan’.

27. Memoirs, IV, 141-144.