Robinson, Agnes Mary Frances

Abstract

Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857–1944) spanned the fin‐de‐siècle English and French literary circles and British aestheticism and modernism. Robinson's reputation in English literature rests on her poetry of the 1880s and her intense friendship with Vernon Lee. However, after her marriage to James Darmesteter (1849–94), her move to Paris in 1888, and her second marriage to Émile Duclaux (1840–1904), she spent the next forty years publishing primarily biography, French literary history, and French history – in both English and French. She earned an income writing for a number of journals and participated in an intellectually stimulating French literary and philosophical group. She is important to our understanding of the intellectual contribution of nineteenth‐century women writers, the growth and demise of British and European aestheticism, and the political, social, and cultural place of women in the late nineteenth and mid‐twentieth centuries.