Given Mary Robinson's widely publicized affairs with the Prince of Wales and other members of fashionable society, it is not surprising that the public appetite for scandal shaped her career and reputation as a novelist. According to Janet Todd, Robinson's first novel, Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity, “sold out on its day of publication [February 2, 1792] primarily because it was suspected to be a roman à clef about her liaison with the Prince.”¹ By February 15 the second edition was exhausted, and on February 27 the third edition appeared with a long dedication in which Robinson announced, “I disclaim the title of a Writer of Novels; the species of composition generally known under that denomination, too often conveys a lesson I do not wish to inculcate.”² Distancing herself from the stigmas often attached to novels and novelists, Robinson also seems anxious to safeguard her identity as a poet. And indeed it is poetry, rather than fiction, that has secured Robinson's place in recent scholarship and revisionist anthologies of the Romantic period.³

Her disclaimer notwithstanding, Robinson went on to publish at least six more novels, including The Widow (1794), Angelina (1796), Hubert de Sevrac (1796), Walsingham (1797), The False Friend (1799), and The Natural Daughter (1799). To varying degrees, all of these works may be said to capitalize on Robinson's own notoriety as well as the popular demand for fiction that traded in the secrets of contemporary high society. Easy assumptions about Robinson's position within the scandal industry, however, tend to occlude the social, historical, and authorial consciousness that enabled her to produce far-reaching commentaries on the scandals of the literary marketplace, the scandals of class and gender oppression, and, ultimately, the scandals of the French Revolution.

As M. Ray Adams recognized almost thirty years ago, the strongest case to be made for a recovery of Robinson's novels rests not on her affair with the Crown Prince but on her association with radical figures such as Charles James Fox, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Despite the subsequent burgeoning of scholarship on revolutionary women writers and the more recent flurry of critical interest in Robinson's poetry, the case for her fiction has gained very little ground.⁴Walsingham is still the only one of Robinson's novels available in a modern edition, and Adams claims that it is also the one that “shows most clearly the influence of revolutionary ideas in her fiction.”⁵ As I will argue, however, that distinction more properly belongs to The Natural Daughter.

Set in England and France during the Reign of Terror, The Natural Daughter is at once a daring excursion into the Godwinian genre of “fictitious history”⁶ and a pioneering venture into the realm of metafiction. As Janet Todd observes, “few women [in Robinson's day] wrote about female authors in their fiction.”⁷ Fewer still created heroines who were professional writers. Robinson's heroine in The Natural Daughter, however, is in many respects her own fictional double—an abandoned wife pressed by financial necessity to pursue careers as an actress, novelist, and poet. Through her double, Martha Morley, Robinson not only presents a spirited defense of her own acting and writing careers; she also offers a penetrating look into the material conditions that frustrated women's endeavors in the theater and the competitive literary marketplace of the 1790s. Owing to circumstances arising from her friendship with another actress, the narrative of Martha's life becomes a narrative of the French Revolution, including scenes of life in a Paris prison, highly sensational portraits of Marat and Robespierre, and a plot that actually hinges upon their deaths. As it combines fictionalized revolutionary history with fictionalized autobiography, The Natural Daughter clearly invites us to look beyond the romantic intrigues of Robinson and her immediate circle to those of Marat, Robespierre, and a number of other figurative or literal fathers whose scandalous private lives point back to Rousseau and ahead to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

To avoid any misunderstanding from the very outset, I want to emphasize that Robinson's lurid portraits of the Jacobin leaders do not constitute a renunciation of the revolutionary sentiments that earned her an infamous place in the anti-Jacobin satire of the 1798.⁸ Although she is certainly distancing herself from the violence of the Jacobin party, Robinson is more concerned with the gender politics that aligned Jacobins and anti-Jacobins than with the party politics that divided them. I will argue this point more closely as I show how Robinson collapses distinctions between ideological fathers of the French Revolution and biological fathers of ostensibly respectable English families. First, however, I want to clarify how Robinson moves beyond the realm of local gossip to enter directly into the revolutionary debate on the rights of women and of illegitimate children. As a corollary to that point, I also want to consider how Robinson frames the revolutionary issues of legitimacy and entitlement as generic issues pertaining to the conception and reception of novels. In the process, I will be arguing for an extensive revision of the narrative constructed by Robinson's most recent biographer, Robert Bass.

Dismissing The Natural Daughter as a “thin novelized autobiography,” Bass claims that it was originally conceived as a fictional exposé of Susan Priscilla Bertie, the natural daughter of the fourth Duke of Ancaster and the bride of Robinson's former lover, Banastre Tarleton. The plan miscarried, Bass conjectures, because Robinson was unable to discover any hint of scandal in Susan's past other than the accident of her birth.⁹ If one accepts the dubious claims of this scenario, Robinson was not only petty and vindictive in her motive, but deficient in her powers of invention, apparently unable to manufacture scandal when she could find none to recycle. In looking for an illegitimate daughter outside the text, however, Bass fails to say anything about the illegitimate daughter within the text, the infant Frances conceived in a Paris prison some five months before the death of Marat. Insofar as Robinson's heroine sacrifices her reputation to befriend this infant and her birth mother, there is certainly reason to question why the textual genesis of the novel should be traced to a rivalry with Susan Priscilla rather than to a sympathetic identification with women like Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, the mother of another revolutionary Frances, better known as Fanny Imlay.

Although I will return to the Wollstonecraft connection later, I posit it here simply to suggest how The Natural Daughter exceeds the dismissive postscripts of her biographers and critics as well as the facile prescripts of her fictional publisher, Mr. Index.¹⁰ While his name itself is a revealing index of Robinson's satiric intent, Bass and others typically fail to acknowledge any critical distance between her own fictional practice and the advice that Mr. Index gives to her fictional double, Martha Morley:

If you have any talent for satire, you may write a work that would be worth purchasing: or if your fertile pen can make a story out of some recent popular event, such as an highly-fashioned elopement, a deserted, distracted husband, an abandoned wife, an ungrateful runaway daughter, or a son ruined by sharpers; … or any thing from real life of equal celebrity or notoriety, your fortune is made; your works will sell. …¹¹

On the surface at least, this advice reads much like a recipe for The Natural Daughter itself. Indeed, Robinson leaves out none of the ingredients that Mr. Index lists. Nor does she neglect his admonition to “mind the title.” As Mr. Index explains,

A Title is the thing above all others. It pleases every order of the high world, and charms into admiration every species of the low: it will cover a multitude of faults: a kind of compendious errata, which sets to rights all the errors of a work, and makes it popular, however incorrect and illiterate it may appear to the eyes of fastidious criticisers. Mind a title. Do not forget that a title is a wonderful harmonizer of things in all ranks and all opinions of men, both morally and politically.

(2:39-40)

In this highly self-conscious metacommentary on her own fictional practice, Robinson certainly makes a wry gesture to the commodity status of her own title, apparently calculated to attract a scandal-loving audience. By punctuating the words of Mr. Index with the telling statement that “Mrs. Morley smiled,” however, Robinson calls attention to the way in which her novel entertains a kind of double discourse, simultaneously gratifying and mocking the pretensions and voyeuristic tendencies of her audience.

In this particular case, Robinson's double discourse reports to a language of double reference, exploiting the familiar comparison between illegitimate novels and illegitimate children. Through the development of her plot, Robinson implicitly extends the comparison to socially illegitimate families as she ridicules the perception that a noble title can legitimize any family wealthy enough to buy one. As Martha's hopelessly vulgar father, Peregrine Bradford, explains to his wife, “Gold will buy every thing; and who knows but I may soon die and leave you a title?” (2:46). Similarly, the ambitious Mr. Leadenhead of the subplot counsels his children to “buy honours, dignities, titles …” (1:253). While Robinson mocks such title mania by exposing the disparity between the commodity value of titles and the true worth of the novels or persons they are assumed to represent, she also invites us to consider how her own title reflects a revolutionary crisis in signification.

Depending on how one defines the term “natural daughter,” for example, the potential referents within the text include not only the illegitimate infant Frances but the heroine, Martha, especially if she is compared to her “unnatural” sister, Julia. Although she is the favored daughter, noted for her docile temperament and conspicuous sensibility, Julia takes her first lover on the night of their father's death, imprisons their mother in a madhouse, poisons her own illegitimate child, and ultimately ends her infamous career by committing suicide in the bed of Robespierre, the last of her serial lovers. By constructing a narrative that repeatedly defines Martha in opposition to her “unnatural” sister and Frances in opposition to her “unnatural” father, Robinson complicates the easy equation between “natural” and “illegitimate” as well as the identification of her title character. Insofar as the title may be understood to name the novel itself, of course, Robinson also undermines the facile assumption that her narrative is the illegitimate daughter of history or the bastard child of a prostitute muse trafficking in the demand for scandal.

Ultimately, I think, Robinson's title provokes two disparate sets of expectations: one derived from a prurient interest in the scandal of illegitimate birth and another shaped by Diderot's Le Fils Naturel (1757), Restif de la Bretonne's La Fille naturelle (1769), and other similar works that Marie Maclean identifies as part of a French tradition extending Rousseau's valorization of the “natural man” to the “natural” child.¹² If the advice of Robinson's fictitious Mr. Index reveals a preoccupation with the first set of expectations, the actual trajectory of Robinson's plot is finally more responsive to the second. Indeed, when we look beyond the title to the narrative itself, Robinson repeatedly criticizes the social distinctions that foster scandal, especially the “unnatural” stigma attached to “natural” children.

Although we may call this a timeless, universal issue, it became a particularly heated issue in revolutionary France, as manifested by the enactment and suspension of laws granting inheritance rights to illegitimate children. On November 2, 1793, for example, the French Convention passed what Lynn Hunt has called “one of its most controversial laws” when it gave illegitimate children “equal rights of inheritance.”¹³ In the wake of strong opposition, the law was officially suspended in 1795 with the decree that “Legal actions concerning paternity are forbidden.”¹⁴ Insofar as it legalized a sexual double standard, leaving the burden of illegitimacy to rest with unwed mothers, this decree may be understood as part of a larger project to reinscribe gender boundaries as well as the gendered boundaries between public and private life.

As Maclean suggests, such reiterations of gender difference are themselves intimately related to the anxiety of an emerging “egalitarian order” that “fears difference” and therefore “endeavours to exclude it … in the form of the illegitimate, and the mothers who give birth to them.” Through this exclusionary practice, Maclean argues, the new “egalitarian” order unwittingly “creates a new maternal identity as a site for a critique of the order itself.”¹⁵ As I want to show in my following account of The Natural Daughter, this new maternal identity is precisely the site from which Robinson chooses to unmask a fraudulent egalitarian order, including sanguinary terrorists like Marat, the so-called Friend of the People, and Robespierre, “The Incorruptible.”

In addition to cameo appearances by these historical figures, Robinson includes a fictional villain, Mr. Morley, who rescues the heroine from “paternal tyranny” only to assert the “authority of a husband” (1:73). As Martha soon realizes, Morley is “rigidly tenacious of an husband's authority; extremely correct in religious duties; a jealous admirer of subordination; and a most decided enemy to every thing that could possibly degrade the dignity of his ancestry” (1:70-71). Having been called away on business soon after their marriage, Morley returns after an extended absence to discover that Martha has adopted an infant girl born in one of the neighboring cottages and subsequently abandoned by its mother. Angered by his wife's independence and disgusted by her democratic sympathies for a child of uncertain birth, Morley accuses Martha of trying to persuade him that “the blood of a noble parent flowed in its veins, while its vital source in reality sprang from plebeian baseness” (2:17-18). As these words suggest, Morley's initial objection to the infant has more to do with his presumptions about its class origins than illegitimacy per se. The malicious innuendoes of the housekeeper and Julia, however, ultimately bring him to suspect that Martha herself is the biological mother of the illegitimate child that she has christened as Frances. Although Martha apparently names the child after the gallant Lord Francis Sherville, the man she presumes to be the father, the name also resonates with revolutionary implications.

Some of these implications very quickly come into focus as Martha, the disowned wife, recognizes the birth mother in a travelling actress who introduces herself as Mrs. Sedgley and relates the gothic terrors leading up to the birth of Frances, or little Fanny, as she is fondly called. In her frame narrative delivered in the privacy of a stage coach, Mrs. Sedgley explains that she was detained by revolutionary authorities in Paris at the height of Marat's power, early 1793. With the shadow of the guillotine looming over her, she reluctantly accepted the gallant proposal of a young Englishman who promised to arrange her release if she would consent to be his wife (1:208). After a one-week prison honeymoon, however, Mrs. Sedgley discovered that her husband had left for England without her. Worse still, she discovered that her prison marriage had been solemnized by a false priest, “nothing more than the valet de chambre of the infamous Marat” (1:210).¹⁶

As she lingered in prison for five months and became visibly pregnant, Mrs. Sedgley was tormented by the “demonian smile” of Marat himself, who promised her freedom in exchange for sexual favors. Faced with his ultimatum, “ou Marat, ou la guillotin!” (1:211), Mrs. Sedgley reluctantly signed her name to his list of victims scheduled for execution the following day. Marat's assassination on the next day, however, miraculously voided the document, and Mrs. Sedgley was allowed to leave prison and return to England. Rumors of her licentious congress with the “abhorred Marat” nevertheless reached England before Mrs. Sedgley did, and she was subsequently disowned by her aristocratic family.

Claiming that she had loved the father of her child and “made a vow never to reveal his name” (1:213), Mrs. Sedgley relates her entire story without disclosing one crucial detail—that the father is none other than Martha's husband, a man well known for exhibiting “the character of a philanthropist and a christian” (1:72). If we date fictitious events in the novel from Mrs. Sedgley's reference to the assassination of Marat (July 13, 1793), Morley's legal marriage to Martha occurs very soon after his false marriage to Mrs. Sedgley in Paris and well before she gives birth to his natural daughter in England, presumably sometime in November of 1793.¹⁷ As we learn at the end of the novel, Mrs. Sedgley abandoned her infant with the expectation that it would be taken into the respectable home of its father and his legal wife, Martha. The great irony, of course, is that Mr. Morley wrongly suspects and persecutes his wife for bearing an illegitimate child that is actually his own.

As a narrative of revolutionary marriage and childbirth, Mrs. Sedgley's story reads like a highly sensationalized version of the history William Godwin relates in the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1798, one year before The Natural Daughter. Like her fictional counterpart, Mrs. Sedgley, Wollstonecraft was threatened by the decree against English citizens in Paris. According to Godwin, this decree “made it necessary, not that a marriage should actually take place, but that Mary should take the name of Imlay … and obtain a certificate from the American ambassador, as the wife of a native of that country.”¹⁸ While many details are different, including the nationality of the husbands, the resemblance between the two situations is underscored by the name that Mrs. Sedgley's natural daughter shares with Wollstonecraft's daughter Frances (Fanny) Imlay. In both instances, the already dubious status of the natural daughter is compounded by the desertion of the biological father.

Although Robinson no doubt saw an opportunity to capitalize on the furor that erupted after Godwin's publication of the Memoirs, I believe it would be a mistake to construe the necessity of selling her work as a “selling out.” Indeed, throughout her novel, Robinson's sympathies clearly reside with the guardians of the natural daughter rather than with the outraged guardians of piety and morality, fictional counterparts of the critics who condemned Wollstonecraft. In the midst of their hue and cry against illicit sexuality and illegitimate birth, Robinson herself came under fire from one contemporary reviewer who refused to grant her novel even the “sad civility” that “it may be read with no other ill consequence than a waste of time.” Associating the pernicious influence of the novel with sentiments and behavior exemplified by its heroine, the reviewer characterizes Martha as “a decidedly flippant female, apparently of the Wollstonecraft school. …”¹⁹

Robinson no doubt received the intended insult as a compliment, one that implicitly acknowledged The Natural Daughter as a fictional extension of the argument presented in her Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Although Robinson originally published the pamphlet under the pseudonym of Anne Frances Randall, she acknowledged that “the writer” was “avowedly of the same school” as Wollstonecraft. Furthermore, she declared, “it requires a legion of Wollstonecrafts to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence.”²⁰

As it recapitulates the historical narrative of Fanny Imlay's illegitimate birth, The Natural Daughter also anticipates the more sensational narrative of illegitimate birth and paternal desertion composed by Wollstonecraft's other daughter, Mary Shelley. Although Victor Frankenstein emerges as a more complex and sympathetic version of Robinson's Morley, the common trajectory of both narratives includes a father's departure from the revolutionary site of the child's conception, his refusal to acknowledge the child as anything other than a social outcast, and, finally, his determination to destroy the child whose very existence has become the focus of a consuming guilt. As noted in Lee Sterrenburg's seminal essay on the revolutionary subtext in Frankenstein, Victor's creation of the monster in Ingolstadt, home of the secret society of the Illuminati, recalls Abbé Barruel's charges that the society had “engendered” a “monster called Jacobin.”²¹ Robinson's Frances bears the taint of a similar genealogy insofar as her mother's family believes she is the offspring of the “sanguinary monster” Marat (2:155).

Conceived not only out of legal wedlock, but in a Paris prison, Frances, like Shelley's monster, embodies the threat of a revolutionary ideology that fed the paranoia of Edmund Burke and others. In Burke's Reflections, for example, Fred Botting observes that “everything in France is constructed as England's other: ‘out of nature,’ irrational, irreligious, and illegitimate. …”²² Whereas Shelley's “hideous progeny” conflates these images of monstrosity with contradictory images of Rousseau's innately benevolent natural man, Robinson's Natural Daughter deconstructs Burke's totalizing vision by collapsing distinctions between the English father Morley and the Jacobin monster Marat. By projecting the image of monstrosity upon the father rather than the child, Robinson also redefines the crime that Burke associated with monstrosity: she displaces parricide with infanticide.

If Mary Shelley's conflicted response to her own revolutionary parentage destabilizes the moral and psychic boundaries between Victor and his progeny, Robinson's more immediate response to the Revolution itself seeks to clarify the difference between its good and bad tendencies by emphasizing the disparity between the natural daughter and the monstrous father. Although Robinson's value judgments are not invariably drawn along gender lines, the pervasive pattern is nevertheless quite similar to the one that Gary Kelly identifies in the later volumes of Helen Maria Williams' Letters from France. As Kelly indicates, after the coup of Robespierre and Williams' own imprisonment in October 1793, she frequently “distinguishes a ‘good’ Revolution, with feminine traits, from the ‘bad’ (Jacobin) Revolution, with masculine traits.”²³ This is not surprising, of course, if we consider how the same period witnessed the beginnings of a Jacobin backlash against women who lobbied for more active participation in the political arena.²⁴

Given this significant turn in events, I believe we need to ask exactly what it means to say that Robinson's “Jacobinism soon faded,” as Kelly suggests it did.²⁵ Does her denunciation of Robespierre, for example, put her in the camp of political turncoats, or does it rather suggest her alignment with radical feminists like Olympe de Gouges?²⁶ Similarly, we might ask whether Robinson's representation of Marat more forcefully bespeaks a Burkean terror of French monstrosity or a revolutionary impulse to expose the infamous dens of monstrosity to the light of common day.²⁷ To assume that Robinson's denunciation of Jacobin monsters announces her retreat to a conservative or even reactionary position is, in effect, to ignore the way that it responds to the Jacobin backlash against the threat of “monstrous,” or politically active, women. It is also to ignore the possibility that some women could perceive a fearful symmetry between Jacobin terrorism in France and domestic terrorism in England. Indeed, as the resemblance of Morley and other despotic English fathers to Marat and Robespierre strongly suggests, Jacobin terrorism was not simply the “Other” of English domestic law and order but, in many instances, its own dark double.

The resemblance between terrorist mentalities in France and in the English family comes into focus as Mrs. Sedgley articulates a position that one might call the doctrinal center of the novel or a précis of Robinson's own revolutionary sympathies. Mrs. Sedgley, is, in fact, a double of Robinson's primary double, Martha. Both are devalued daughters of tyrannical fathers and prisoners of the Terror in France; both pursue acting careers to relieve their financial distress; and, in a manner of speaking, both are wives of Morley and mothers of Frances. If Robinson steers a precarious narrative course between the Scylla and Charybdis of Jacobin terrorists and English reactionaries, however, Mrs. Sedgley voices the plight of a woman who has escaped from the Jacobin monster only to be spurned by its mirror opposite in her own family:

I dreaded their austere opinions on political events; and I knew that every thing which bore the faintest shadow of democracy was hateful to their feelings. The horrible scenes which I had recently witnessed justified their sentiments, and had I dared to present myself before them, I would have convinced their minds, that though an idolater of Rational Liberty, I most decidedly execrated the cruelty and licentiousness which blackened the page of Time, while History traces the annals of this momentous aera. But alas! the impetuosity of political partizans, will not permit them to draw conclusions with candour, or to judge opinions by the fair rule of reason. Every individual who shrinks from oppression, every friend to the superior claims of worth and genius, is, in these suspecting times, condemned without even an examination; though were truth and impartiality to influence their judges, they would be found the first to venerate the sacred rights of social order, and the last to uphold the atrocities of anarchy.

My family paid little attention to causes, and were only led to draw their conclusions from effects. I had been compelled to form an union for the preservation of existence. But I had formed it, and that circumstance was sufficient to stigmatize me in their opinion for ever.

(1:212-13)

Like many other English reactionaries, the members of Mrs. Sedgley's family lack what Wollstonecraft called “the philosophical eye … able to discern the cause, which has produced so many dreadful effects.”²⁸ In their zealous obsession with propriety, however, they become like agents of the Terror in France, accepting rumors as proof of guilt and disallowing any opportunity for a fair trial or explanation.

The symmetry between Jacobin terrorism and domestic terrorism becomes still more explicit when Morley locks Martha in a London hotel room just weeks before they are both incarcerated in a Paris prison during the reign of Robespierre. In her brief interval of freedom, Martha gives in to Morley's desire for a reconciliation because “the summons of a dying, though undeserving husband, was not to be resisted by a being, generous, noble, and forgiving, like the ill-treated Martha” (2:233). Despite Morley's confession that he has had an affair with Julia and fathered the child that she murdered, Martha also agrees to satisfy his demand that she prove her own innocence by introducing him to Fanny's birth mother. As they are traveling to Mrs. Sedgley's new residence in Switzerland by way of Paris, however, the Morleys are detained in the notorious Abbaye, the same prison from which Mrs. Sedgley escaped little more than a year before.

At this point in the novel, the dizzying hall-of-mirrors effect becomes almost overwhelming as Martha enters the carceral world previously occupied by her double, Mrs. Sedgley, and the events of July 1793 are reenacted, with different players, in July 1794. After four days of “misery and suspense,” Martha is “summoned to attend the ruler of her destiny” at the hotel de la liberté. The “unrelenting judge” that she beholds upon entering the “magnificently furnished” saloon, however, is not Robespierre, but her own sister, “the abandoned Julia.” While Martha lies in a dead faint brought on by the shock of this discovery, Julia hastens to the Abbaye to offer Morley his liberty “on the condition that she should be the companion of his journey.” Professing her undying love for Morley, Julia exults, “rather than see you re-united with my sister, I will see you perish. Your life is in my hands. My lover is your judge; and he is all powerful, the daring Robespierre” (2:263-64). Julia's proposal effectively puts Morley in the position previously occupied by the imprisoned Mrs. Sedgley as she received similar offers from Morley himself as well as from Marat. Much as she refused the compromising terms offered by Marat, so Morley “disdain[s] to accept his liberty on such terms” as Julia now offers. Consequently, he and Martha are doomed to a “more close confinement” in “separate subterraneous cells” (2:265).

Mrs. Sedgley's release after the assassination of Marat on July 13, 1793, however, finds its parallel in the Morleys' miraculous release on the morning of Robespierre's execution, July 28, 1794: “their dungeons were thrown open, and they were conducted forth to witness the last scene of their persecutor's misery: on a scaffold, pale, ghastly, lacerated, trembling at his approaching destiny, and shuddering while he anticipated the just vengeance of an offended Creator, they beheld the homicide Robespierre” (2:265-66). Much like Wordsworth at the close of Book X in The Prelude, Robinson represents the death of Robespierre as a momentous turning point in the Revolution, a long-awaited manifestation of “everlasting Justice.”²⁹

Where Wordsworth simply voices his confidence that Jacobin “madness stands declared and visible,” however, Robinson presents a highly theatrical scene exemplifying many features of the “aesthetics of embodiment” that Peter Brooks has identified with the democratic ideology of revolutionary melodrama. “Because melodrama's simple, unadulterated messages must be made absolutely clear, visually present to the audience,” Brooks explains, “the bodies of victims and villains must unambiguously signify their status.” Whereas “virtuous bodies” are liberated from “nightmarish Gothic spaces” and “implicitly recognized as bearing the mark of innocence,” guilty bodies are “expelled from the social realm” and “branded as evil.”³⁰ As Robinson's description of Robespierre's body suggests, the revolutionary imperative to discipline and punish ultimately brings his guilty, dissimulating body into compliance with the republican virtue of transparency, a virtue all but synonymous with “a body that told no lies and kept no secrets.”³¹

The aesthetics of embodiment continues as the Morleys enter the plundered apartments of “the exterminated monster,” only to discover on his bed the “lifeless, self-murdered body of Julia,” her “blackening form” betraying the tell-tale signs of poison. Nothing less sensational, of course, would provide a fitting end to such an “unnatural fiend” as Julia. If we can get beyond the obvious sensationalism, however, the liaison between Robespierre and Julia hints at an illicit, undercover alliance between French extremists and English conservatives.³² At any rate, the difference between the public images of the French Robespierre and the English Morley is seriously undermined by the fact that Julia's body is the common venue of their licentious private lives.

In tarnishing the image of “The Incorruptible,” Robinson is not simply inventing scandal, but resurrecting the motif of sexual licentiousness that emerged in the posthumous smear campaign linking Robespierre to the “most uproarious orgies” and “concubines ‘in nearly all the communes’ of the Ile de France.”³³ That such allegations were not automatically dismissed as lies is evidenced by one of Wollstonecraft's letters asking Imlay to “enquire … whether, as a member declared in the convention, Robespierre really maintained a number of mistresses.”³⁴ The most bizarre accusations, however, stemmed from reports that Robespierre, having conspired with “foreign powers,” was planning to marry the daughter of Louis XVI and declare himself king.³⁵

Observing that “a false rumor is a real [and revealing] social fact,” Bronislaw Baczko attributes “the tale of Robespierre-the-king” to the “the social imagination fashioned by the Terror”:

In an atmosphere strained to extremes by successive purges, by the elevation of informing into a civic virtue, by the ever increasing and boundless accusations, by the unending discoveries of new plots, it seemed that no one could any longer escape from suspicion at some time or another. The revolutionary heroes of yesterday, were they not today unveiled as so many enemies, whose zeal was only a mask behind which were hidden the darkest designs of tomorrow and complicity with aristocrats and royalists?³⁶

As Baczko suggests, the semblance of complicity was created in part by the resemblance between the crimes imputed to Robespierre and his royalist counterparts, most notably perhaps Marie Antoinette.

In addition to the related charges of sexual promiscuity and counter-revolutionary intrigues, Robinson also implicitly transfers allegations of the Queen's abominable love of luxury to the man who would be king. Although historians keep us ever mindful of Robespierre's proverbial austerity, Robinson conjures up images of the desacralized monarchy as she describes the lavish furnishings of his plundered apartments:

… the floor was deluged with blood! murder had been permitted to blur the face of noon-day, and the abode of guilty luxury now presented the mere wrecks of desolation. Every wretch, whose heart had palpitated under the tyranny of the remorseless despot, now dealt its groans and exercised its vengeance, on even those objects which, only by being inanimate, had escaped his cruelty.

(2:266)

As Robinson goes on to detail the riotous destruction of rich velvet hangings, “costly plates of looking-glass,” “inlaid cabinets,” and “splendid lustres,” her account recalls nothing so much as the October 1789 assault upon Versailles, memorably described by Burke, Wollstonecraft, and others.

Given her previous identification with Marie as a slandered woman and the flattering poetic tribute she pays in her “Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France” (1793), Robinson's portrait of Robespierre reads much like an exercise in narrative revenge as it reverses the Jacobin charges against the Queen or turns the tables of slander. The obvious political reversal is more importantly, I think, a gender reversal, avenging the wronged royal mother by exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the usurping Jacobin father.

As Dorinda Outram has emphasized, the Jacobins themselves subordinated other marks of political affiliation to gender when they drew one common lesson from the fates of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and Madame Roland: “contemporaries were quick to link the three women together, whatever their differences in birth and outlook, and to use their common fate of condemnation and execution as a warning to other women who attempted … to gain visibility in the political process.”³⁷ Robinson presents what one might call a feminist riposte to this masculine discourse as her novel exposes the monstrous affinity between the ideological fathers of the Terror in France and the biological father of Fanny. Despite their obvious differences in nationality and politics, Robinson emphasizes that the opposing parties have both abandoned the legitimate goals of the Revolution espoused by the guardians of little Fanny, the natural daughter.

Although she has no real character other than that of a wronged innocent, Fanny nevertheless provides a pretext for the expression of revolutionary sentiments under the guise of sentimental attachment to an abandoned infant. When Martha, for example, professes to “acknowledge no distinction but that which originates in virtue” (1:111), she utters the talismanic word that Rousseau invested with a power widely exploited by Girondins and Jacobins alike.³⁸ According to Carol Blum, Rousseau's concept of virtue not only inspired “the audacity to denounce and ultimately destroy the prestige of the hierarchy of blood” but also “provided the basis for intense personal political binding to a small nucleus of ‘elevated souls.’”³⁹

That Robinson's audience recognized the larger political valence of such sentiments in The Natural Daughter is borne out by a contemporary review which takes particular exception to “phrases which might be called the technicals of literary discontent: ‘the petrifying hand of avaricious pride’—‘Prejudging world’—‘unfeeling world’—‘unpitying world’—‘Ill-judging,’ ‘illiberal world’. …” The reviewer goes on to complain that “the inhabitants of these worlds are so unmercifully epitheted as the worlds themselves: ‘vulgar minds’—‘unenlightened mind’—‘bosoms unenlightened by the finely organized hand of Nature’—‘recreant ignorance’—‘vulgar arrogance of less ennobled beings’—‘aristocracy of wealth,’ &c. &c.” Finally, apparently alluding to Robinson's slanderous portraits of Marat and Robespierre, the reviewer concludes, “it is of little use to lament or censure the French revolution, if the morals and manners which tended to produce it, are inculcated and held up for imitation.”⁴⁰

Sharing Burke's monolithic, totalizing view of the revolution, this reviewer apparently sees nothing but self-contradiction in a novel that validates the democratic tendencies of revolutionary morals and manners even as it censures the excesses of Marat and Robespierre. I think there can be little question, however, that Robinson's highly sensational plot works not only to separate one from the other, but to deal out punishments and rewards consistent with the melodramatic aesthetics of embodiment. The violent deaths of Marat, Robespierre, and Julia, in fact, constitute a signifying chain of villainy that leads, finally, to Morley's grotesquely mangled body, “writhing with agonies, both mental and corporeal,” at the bottom of a steep cliff near Mrs. Sedgley's home in Lausanne (2:278).

As it exemplifies “the just vengeance of insulted Heaven” (2:276), Morley's fate also ironically fulfills the thwarted design of his own unjust vengeance against Martha and her beloved Fanny. To Morley's already suspicious mind, Martha's biological relation to the “accursed bastard” is confirmed when the child, knowing “no accent but that of nature,” addresses her “by the name of mother” (2:274). Just as Morley threatens to “rend it to atoms” on the rocks below, however, Mrs. Sedgley rushes to the scene to pronounce the “fiat of his destiny”: “My child! my infant! oh Morley, Morley! thou inhuman father!” (2:276). As Brooks observes, melodrama “repeatedly strives towards moments where repression is broken through, to the physical and verbal staging of the essential: moments where repressed content returns as recognition, of the deepest relations of life, as in the celebrated voix du sang (You! my father!), and of moral identities (So you are the author of all my wrongs!).”⁴¹ While the “last act” of The Natural Daughter generally conforms to this pattern of melodramatic staging, Mrs. Sedgley's identification of Morley as Fanny's “inhuman father” conflates his biological identity with his despicable moral identity. Where melodrama typically betrays a kind of biological essentialism, privileging the emotional bonds between persons of common blood, Robinson's usage of the italicized terms mother and father accentuates a disparity between biological identity and emotional identification.⁴²

As Morley's death in Switzerland completes a signifying chain of villainy within the novel, it also points back to implicate Rousseau, often hailed as the philosophical father of the French Revolution. Recapitulating the numerous tributes to Rousseau scattered throughout her earlier novels, Robinson explicitly identifies the locale of her ending as a place “made sacred” by Rousseau, the founding father of “nature's school” (2:220). In choosing this site to expose Morley's infamous paternity of Frances, however, Robinson leaves us with a powerful reminder that the venerable Rousseau was also the biological father of children that he abandoned without even bothering to record the dates of their birth. Although Voltaire exposed the scandal in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1764, Edmund Burke gave it currency in England with the famous denunciation of Rousseau in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791). Burke's Rousseau is, in fact, the very paradigm of hypocritical sensibility exemplified by Robinson's Julia, but more commonly associated with revolutionary terrorists: “He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings.”⁴³ As Carol Blum notes, “the spectre of these children has hung over Rousseau's reputation” for more than two centuries.⁴⁴

Often evoked to discredit Rousseau's philosophical views and professions of virtues, the spectre of his abandoned children also haunted a number of Robinson's contemporaries in 1799. In the anti-Jacobin campaign against Coleridge, for example, the accusation that he had “left his little one fatherless” bears a distinct echo of the charges brought against Rousseau.⁴⁵ Exchanging poetic tributes with Coleridge in the pages of the Morning Post, Robinson may have helped to corroborate what Paul Magnuson has called Coleridge's “self-defense” in “Frost at Midnight,” a poem that emphasizes his devotion to the infant Hartley and, by extension, the strength of his “domestic affections.” If Robinson's poetic tributes to Coleridge work to banish the spectre of Rousseau's children, however, The Natural Daughter performs an act of narrative exorcism. By projecting Rousseau's history of paternal neglect onto her villain Morley, Robinson, in effect, purges the reputation of Rousseau and thereby purifies the philosophical ground of the Revolution.

Despite her various affinities with Coleridge, Rousseau, Burke, and Godwin, however, Robinson's response to the Revolution is finally, I think, a consistently gendered woman's response, upholding the ideal of the affectionate, egalitarian family. As Anne Mellor has argued, by “invoking the ‘domestic affections’ as the model for all political actions, the women writers of the Romantic period proposed a new political program, one that would inexorably change the existing systems of patriarchy and primogeniture.”⁴⁶ Drawing upon this model, Robinson's reconfiguration of tyrannical families in The Natural Daughter hinges upon the moment of crisis when Fanny is saved from Morley's wrath by the timely intervention of Lord Francis Sherville, the man that Martha and her husband had both assumed to be Fanny's father. As Martha learns at the very end of the novel, however, Lord Francis is not Fanny's father, but her uncle, the brother of the woman that Martha has known only by the assumed name of Mrs. Sedgley. Although he had disowned his sister on the grounds of her “revolutionary marriage” and reputed liaison with the “sanguinary monster” Marat (2:155), Lord Francis emerges finally as a chastened aristocrat, laying aside the exclusionary law of the father to acknowledge Mrs. Sedgley as his sister and to ask the widowed and untitled Martha for her hand as his wife.

Recalling the Freudian pattern of family romance that emerges in other novels, such as Fanny Burney's Evelina, this turn of events clearly privileges the aristocratic title of Lord Francis and the elevated social status it imparts to the infant Frances as well as to Mrs. Sedgley and to Martha. Robinson, in fact, ends the novel on a note that reverberates with the wisdom of Mr. Index: “Mind a title. Do not forget that a title is a wonderful harmonizer of things …” (2:39-40). At the same time, however, Robinson also gestures towards the republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity that informed the patterns of family romance wrought by the “political unconscious” of the French Revolution. As Lynn Hunt has emphasized, these revolutionary versions of family romance “were not neurotic reactions to disappointment—as in Freud's formulation—but creative efforts to reimage the political world, to imagine a polity unhinged from patriarchal authority.”⁴⁷

Although one may conclude that Robinson's efforts in The Natural Daughter are marred by her reliance upon the authority invested in the aristocratic title of Lord Francis Sherville, his name offers a paradigm of sorts for Robinson's double discourse in the novel. In this particular case, Robinson invites us to weigh the patriarchal implications of his title against the androgynous implications of his given name and the feminist implications of his family name. Insofar as it conflates the feminine pronouns she and her, Sherville's name resonates with the feminist implications that many readers have found in Mary Shelley's use of the name Saville, a name shared by her ideal male in Lodore and by her fictional double in Frankenstein.⁴⁸

If the artifice of such encoded names looks forward to a town or political entity where women enjoy full rights of citizenship, Robinson anticipates that prospect as she envisages an extended egalitarian family predicated upon the exclusion of the monstrous biological father rather than the exclusion of the natural daughter. Insofar as he is the brother of Fanny's birth mother and the husband of Fanny's adoptive mother, Lord Francis is, of course, the nominal head of this family, but Frances, the natural daughter, is its center. As such, she is also the ideological center of a powerful maternal identity shared by fictional women like Martha and Mrs. Sedgley as well as by real women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley.

By representing Sherville as a champion of the untitled and illegitimate, Robinson implicitly acknowledges a significant political reality of her own day, namely that aristocrats held enormous power to challenge the traditional hierarchies of class and gender. Robinson's most explicit acknowledgment of this power comes through her fictional representation of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Known in life for her ardent support of the opposition leader Charles James Fox as well as for her patronage of Robinson, Georgiana enters Robinson's text as a patron of her fictional double, Martha. Finding herself stranded in Spa, Martha is taken in by Georgiana, much to the horror of her haughty acquaintance Lady Penelope Pryer: “She could not conceive how the duchess of Chatsworth, a woman of the most exemplary conduct, could receive a doubtful character, foster a stranger in a foreign country, and become the avowed patroness of one, who had nothing but talents to support her” (2:169).⁴⁹ Defying Lady Penelope's rigid observance of hierarchal distinctions, Georgiana not only befriends Martha but also extends her generosity to Fanny and Mrs. Sedgley. Identified by name as “the object of universal idolatry,” Georgiana is the polar opposite of Marat and Robespierre on Robinson's spectrum of praise and blame.

Once again, on one level, Robinson is certainly complying with the dictates of Mr. Index: “You must be careful to enumerate all the good qualities of your patron, and to skim lightly over the bad ones” (2:40). In Georgiana's case, there was, in fact, much to skim over, most notably her natural daughter secretly born and reared abroad. Although it is possible to read Robinson's Natural Daughter as a kind of veiled extortion letter, I believe her primary objective was to incorporate Georgiana into a network of female sympathy supporting women who were victims of scandal or the fear of scandal.

Georgiana's position is particularly interesting in view of L. G. Mitchell's claim that “illegitimacy carried no stigma in Foxite circles, the bastard and the heir being brought up in the same nursery.”⁵⁰ The Duke's natural daughters were, in fact, assimilated into the Devonshire household and treated much the same as his legitimate children born to Georgiana.⁵¹ Her own natural daughter, however, remained a closely guarded secret. For readers in the know, Robinson's fictional account of Georgiana's interest in the welfare of Martha, Frances, and her birth mother would have suggested something more than disinterested benevolence. Indeed, it may well have elicited sympathy for Georgiana herself, particularly insofar as the sexual double standard required her to entrust her illegitimate daughter to foster parents or to renounce her title and all claim to her legitimate children. While Robinson's text explicitly figures Georgiana as a donor, she is also implicitly a recipient in the network of female sympathy that crosses class boundaries as well as the boundaries between life and fiction.

From a historical perspective, Robinson's portrait of Georgiana is interesting precisely because it represents an unsuccessful attempt to revitalize a dying system of patronage. Rejecting the paternalistic paradigm, which survived even among the bluestockings, Robinson presents Georgiana as the model for a new system based upon the paradigm of sisterhood and a shared maternal identity. Although Robinson ultimately failed to dislocate patronage from patriarchy, even as she failed to free herself from the commercialism of Paternoster Row, her Letter to the Women of England offers a more useful model for the promotion of women writers as it concludes with a “List of British Female Literary Characters Living in the Eighteenth Century.”

As a counterpart to the list of influential patrons and subscribers prefacing some of her earlier volumes, the list of thirty-nine names at the end of Robinson's Letter represents a significant step toward the compilation of a women's literary history, an alternative form of legitimatizing identification. Although Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the only work Robinson identifies by title, she acknowledges the diverse contributions of other women writers by identifying their names with a democratically wide range of genres, including biographies, comedies, dramatic pieces, essays, histories, letters, moral pieces, novels, philosophical and metaphysical disquisitions, poems, romances, sacred dramas, satires, tragedies, translations, and travel writings. No longer disclaiming the title of a “Writer of Novels,” Robinson identifies herself as the author of “Poems, Romances, Novels, a Tragedy, Satires, &c. &c.” (102). As we approach the bicentennial anniversary of her death in the year 2000 and continue to interrogate the hierarchal boundaries of gender and genre, Robinson's “&c. &c.” serves as a powerful reminder of the work that lies ahead.

Notes

1. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1160-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 223. As Chris Cullens has emphasized in her reading of the later novel Walsingham, Robinson's affair with the Prince “stayed firmly lodged in the mass cultural imagination,” and she “ended up functioning as a publicly identified sign of lost womanhood,” “Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness” (Body and Text in the Eighteenth-Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothy Von Mucke [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 267). Although I think it assumes particular urgency with Robinson's novels, the issue of her self-commodification has emerged as a persistent theme in recent discussions of her work in other genres as well. See, for example, Judith Pascoe, “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover and London: University Press of New England), 252-68; Linda H. Peterson, “Becoming an Author: Mary Robinson's Memoirs and the Origins of the Woman Artist's Autobiography,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 36-50; and Sharon Setzer, “Mary Robinson's Sylphid Self: The End of Feminine Self-Fashioning,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996): 501-20.

2. Quoted in Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (1957; rpt., Columbia, SC: Sandlapper Press, 1973), 315.

3. Recent interest in Robinson's poetry is reflected by the thirty-five pages she claims in Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak's new anthology British Literature, 1780-1830 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996). Major critical reassessments of her poetry include Stuart Curran's “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism, 17-35; Jerome McGann's chapter “Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho” in The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 94-116; and Judith Pascoe's “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace.”

4. To date, Chris Cullens' essay, cited above, is still the only extended analysis of Robinson's work as a novelist.

5. M. Ray Adams, Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism with Special Reference to the French Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 123.

6. Given her close friendship with William Godwin in 1799, Robinson may well have known and shared some of his liberal views on the merits of “fictitious history.” For example, Godwin wrote, “I ask not, as a principal point whether it be true or false? My first enquiry is, can I derive instruction from it?” (quoted in Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 199).

7. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 223.

8. The anti-Jacobin satire directed against Robinson, Wollstonecraft, and other women writers, is exemplified by Richard Polwhele's poem “The Unsex'd Females” and James Gilray's cartoon “New Morality,” both published in 1798.

9. Robert Bass, The Green Dragoon, 392-93.

10. For an account of Robinson's own transactions with publishers, see Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women Publishers and Money, 1790-1820,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 191-207.

11. Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter, With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel. 2 Vols. (Dublin: Brett Smith, 1799) 2:37. All subsequent references are to this same edition, which I was able to obtain on microfilm from the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia. An earlier edition was printed by Longman and Rees, London, 1799.

12. Marie Maclean, The Name of the Mother: Writing Illegitimacy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 59, 221.

13. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 66.

14. Jenny Teichman, Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 155.

15. Marie Maclean, The Name of the Mother, 44. Although she is not specifically concerned with the issue of illegitimacy, Dorinda Outram observes a similar dynamics at work as the culture of the French Revolution excluded “social elements rigidly designated as ‘other,’ most notably women, and the lower classes” (The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989], 163).

16. According to Oliver Blanc, at the time of Mrs. Sedgley's imprisonment in the Abbaye, a considerable number of the inmates were genuine priests arrested for their refusal to take the constitutional oath (Last Letters: Prisoners of the French Revolution 1793-1794, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987], 8).

17. Robinson's references to the deaths of Marat and Robespierre give us two precise points of historical reference, but the intervening period of a year and two weeks does not allow enough time for all the events within the narrative to unfold. That may well explain why the opening lines of the novel set it in April 1792 rather than April 1793. While the latter date would be more consistent with historical time, the former helps to create the illusion of sufficient narrative time. Given this problem with dates in the novel, it may be nothing more than an interesting coincidence that Fanny is born just about the time the French Convention made legal provisions to improve the status of illegitimate children and their mothers.

18. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York and London: Garland, 1974), 108. According to her own Memoirs, Robinson herself narrowly escaped arrest when she sailed from Calais on September 2, 1792, just a few hours before “the arret arrived, by which every British subject throughout France was restrained” (Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written By Herself. With Some Posthumous Pieces. 4 vols. [London: R. Phillips, 1801], 2:139).

19. British Critic 16 (1800): 320.

20. Anne Frances Randall, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. With Anecdotes (London: Longman and Rees, 1799), 3.

21. Lee Sterrenburg, “Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 156.

22. Fred Botting, “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and Monstrosity,” in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 29.

23. Gary Kelly, “Revolution and Romantic Feminism: Women, Writing, and Cultural Revolution,” in Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Roman Selden (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 119.

24. According to Lynn Hunt, “the turning point in republican images of women—and consequently of the family itself—seems to have occurred in the time between the suppression of women's clubs in October 1793 and the Festival of the Supreme Being in June 1794” (The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 153).

25. The English Jacobin Novel, 12, 112. While I am not interested in making a case for The Natural Daughter as a Jacobin novel, it does exhibit a number of the features that Kelly finds characteristic of the genre—i.e. obviously encoded names, inset narratives, and a thematic interest in current social issues, or topics of contemporary debate.

26. According to Maclean, “Olympe's fate was sealed when she attempted a move into the male revolutionary arena and publicly denounced the tyranny of Robespierre” (The Name of the Mother, 104).

27. As Emmet Kennedy, among others, has emphasized, “the revolutionary imagination is obsessed with enclosed space, where private wills conspire against the general will. A patriot must throw light on these recesses of crime” (A Cultural History of the French Revolution [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989], 312).

28. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), 6:235.

29. As Robert M. Maniquis, among others, has noted, Wordsworth's “hearing of Robespierre's death in a landscape, where there is a happy crowd and a ruined chapel” typifies his “attempt to negate both historical violence and vast, opposing ‘terrible’ retributions” (“Holy Savagery and Wild Justice: English Romanticism and the Terror,” Studies in Romanticism 28 [1989]: 384).

30. Peter Brooks, “The Revolutionary Body,” Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 45-46. For different perspectives on revolutionary melodrama, including the charge that it is “falsely democratic,” see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 188.

31. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 97.

32. Such a hint is not wholly at odds with the more common perception that England's declaration of war against France was in large measure responsible for the Terror in France. See Maniquis, “Holy Savagery and Wild Justice,” 374.

33. Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12-13.

34. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 6:386-87.

35. Baczko, Ending the Terror, 6.

36. Ibid., 23-24.

37. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 127.

38. The democratic implications of Martha's position here are underscored throughout the novel by contrapuntal echoes such as those we find in Mrs. Sedgley's assertion that her father “acknowledged no distinction but those of birth and rank” (1:196).

39. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 139. Insofar as the masculine sphere of public virtue was defined in opposition to a feminine realm of private virtue (Outram, 126), the revolutionary discourse on virtue upheld the prejudice that Robinson's Martha encounters as an actress.

40. British Critic 16 (1800): 320.

41. Peter Brooks, “The Revolutionary Body,” 46.

42. Insofar as Fanny articulates her one word in the novel—mother—at the sight of Martha, this scene in the novel presents compelling evidence to support Anne Mellor's contention that “Romantic women writers wished to rest their concept of maternity not on biological essentialism but on social construction” (Romanticism and Gender [New York and London: Routledge, 1993], 82).

43. Quoted in Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 41. As Duffy indicates, the waning vogue of sensibility in the mid 1790s and after was due in part to the “bad name” it had gotten from the “revolutionary Rousseau” (50). See also Chris Jones, “Radical Sensibility in the 1790s,” Reflections of Revolution, 68.

44. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, 74.

45. Quoted in Paul Magnuson, “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’” in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Krober and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 194-95. For a recent discussion of the relationship between Coleridge and Robinson, see Susan Luther, “A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge's Mrs. Robinson,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 391-409.

46. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender, 66. As Mellor elsewhere acknowledges, “the trope of the egalitarian family” was not entirely “unproblematic,” especially insofar as “its affirmation of the power of parents over children … implicitly endorses the preservation of a class system” (“English Women Writers and the French Revolution,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992], 270).

47. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, xiv.

48. According to William Veeder, for example, the name Saville (sa ville) suggests “that communal state which is the union of male with female and the ideal of Frankenstein” (“Gender and Pedagogy: The Questions of Frankenstein,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Frankenstein, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt [New York: MLA, 1990], 39). In her Letter to the Women of England, Robinson articulates a similar ideal as she enjoins her “enlightened country-women” to remember that “they are not the mere appendages of domestic life but the partners, the equal associates of man …” (3).

49. “Chatsworth” was the name of the Devonshire family estate in Derbyshire; thus Robinson's contemporaries would have immediately identified “the accomplished Georgiana, duchess of Chatsworth” (2:163-64) with the living Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

50. L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 97. The same page includes quotations from a letter making rather vulgar references to Robinson's affair with Fox (and others) in 1782.

51. The mother of these children, Elizabeth Foster, was also assimilated into the household, apparently with Georgiana's blessing, and she eventually became the second Duchess of Devonshire after Georgiana's death. For more extensive accounts of the curious ménage see Iris Leveson Gower, The Face without a Frown: Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: Frederick Muller, 1944); and Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Two Duchesses (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).