“Poetry [and] Politics”: Mary Robinson I

Abstract

The literary career of Mary Robinson (1758–1800),1 like that of Charlotte Smith, is marked by an ongoing engagement with political and cultural concerns informed concurrently by the pressures of financial need, and her response to the French Revolution and its aftermath is likewise shaped by an identification with victimhood and vulnerability drawn from personal experience.2 Robinson’s identification with the Revolution is differently nuanced from Smith’s, however, and emerges from the events of her unconventional life. As a young, married actress, she had become the mistress of the Prince of Wales and later of a series of prominent public figures, before settling into a long-term and equally unconventional (and conspicuous) relationship with Banastre Tarleton, a military hero from the American Revolutionary War and later MP. Even as she published six novels, several collections of poetry and various political and prose tracts, she could never escape from the burden of an unremitting social notoriety, especially during her early literary career, but also to a certain extent during her later years as well, when she moved in the progressive intellectual circles of London. Such was the strength of Robinson’s understanding of social ostracism that alongside her support of the French Revolution, the focus on individual suffering and existential loss, especially during the Revolution’s more contentious periods, often takes precedence over and in fact obscures, other, more abstract, ideological issues. Political awareness, individual experience and sympathy, and the various ways they converge in her writing thus serve to characterize, yet also complicate the perception of Robinson’s revolutionary project.