Abstract
That Mary Robinson, a celebrated beauty, would publish poems in The Morning Post written in the voice of a popular caricature, Tobias Smollett's sex-starved old maid Tabitha Bramble, suggests that she not only capitalised on beauty, but also interrogated its power as cultural force. And that some of theTabitha Bramble poems were included in her final volume of poems, Lyrical Tales (1800), invites thought about their relation to their suggested namesake, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Robinson uncovers the fabrication of impasse promoted by liberalism and therefore presents a powerful critique of Wordsworth's own project. Through the raucous bluntness of the Tabitha Bramble poems, Robinson allows us to see that while Wordsworth's tales attempt to transcend social struggles, Robinson would call her reader to consider the nature of our relations as social beings as a first step towards a more equitable form of social transformation.
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