From "Lyrical Ballads" to "Lyrical Tales": Mary Robinson's Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt

Abstract

All reputation is ... hard to win, harder to keep. --William Hazlitt, Table Talk Reputation is valuable; and whatever is of value ought to enter into our estimates. A and man will be anxious so to conduct himself that he may not be misunderstood. He will be patient in explaining, where his motives have been and misconstrued. It is a spirit of false bravado that will not descend to vindicate itself from misrepresentation. ---William Godwin, Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature WRITERS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH--AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND shared a personal AND social investment in the necessary danger and fragile asset, reputation. As the reading market grew exponentially, authors were increasingly confronted with their inability to limit the meanings of their words and, thus, they faced an inability to control their public images. Reputation was precarious, William Hazlitt's comment implies; like money, it circulated. Its substance was determined from outside by critics and reviewers, by readers and market demands and by the literary tradition. It often had little grounding in a writer's sense of his/her own value, though it was nonetheless essential for continued publication. Like writing, reputation culminated in credit, not property, and credit implied debts. Reputation, then, signified dependence, a failure to authorize one-self Simultaneously, however, an author's value in the late eighteenth century increasingly focused on qualities of personality and originality. (1) Such an emphasis on qualities of the author seemingly extricated him/her from these increasing debts to publishers, critics, and other authors, and refigured him/her as a self-authorizing subject, a creative Genius. While the literary property debates and the defeat of perpetual copyright in the second half of the eighteenth century increased the commodification of books, as many critics have shown, this romantic myth of the Genius Author--a production of both poets and literary critics since then--rose to obscure the reality of the literary marketplace. In an increasingly capitalist economy, no longer a world of strict patronage, this contradiction, inherent in the concept of reputation, between debt to others and demand for originality pervaded many writers' realities. As Hazlitt and Godwin suggest in the epigraphs above, reputation became an important but tenuous commodity in a competitive economy, a representation separate from the writer's self (something to be won and defended) and yet explicitly linked to the writing subject's authority (something to be misapprehended and misconstrued by others). A reputation that was just and reasonable was valuable in and of itself, despite its immateriality; it required maintenance through continual explanation and vindication. Such continual self-defense suggests that any reputation was always also misrepresentation, any sense of original genius always embattled, even illusory. In this light, reputation might be read as a form of dispossession, providing identity at the same time it points to the hollowness of that identity, a subjectivity that is necessarily other within itself, continually requiring elaboration, and always defined by forces outside itself. No longer self-possessed, but a copy of oneself, and a copy that must be defended in order to maintain one's reputation as original, the writing subject is continually confronted with his/her own contingency. While romantic writers, male and female, shared this sense of dispossession, for women writers, the marketplace was especially hazardous and reputation even more fragile. (2) In the case of many women writers, the danger was at least double-edged: on the one hand, they needed to create enough of a reputation as writers to support themselves; on the other hand, as women, their reputations were already fixed by their gender and they had continually to defend their virtue. …