Robinson and Her Many Masks

Mary Robinson’s public image as an actress and at times transgressive female are inseparable from her identity as an author and poet. Having begun her public life as an actress, Robinson remained keenly conscious of the power of audience. She intentionally re-scripted her own past, using her lurid fame to launch her successful writing career. Written at the end of her life, The Haunted Beach represents a culmination of efforts to make a serious impact on the world of poetry. Among other daring moves, Robinson's poem effectively engages with a known poet, in its recognizable similarities to Coleridge's Rime, and makes a social commentary on a murder she witnessed. The poem’s vaguely defined relationship with audience mirrors Robinson’s own multiplicity in voice. Just as The Haunted Beach is told by an unidentified observer, ultimately Robinson’s own identity remains unknowable; at best she is a fusion of her many pseudonyms, stage characters, and ideas presented in her written works.

Much has been written on Robinson’s complicated relationship with the public, as well as her intriguing rapport with contemporary artists such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. In considering “The Haunted Beach,” one of the last poems Robinson wrote before her death, one must pay with attention to her complex path to artist and public figure; both the poem’s conception and its reception are affected by her public persona and her artistic and social connections. Robinson crafted multiple identities as actress, author and poet, all of which play into her constantly developing poetic project. Poetry became for Robinson not only a forum for earning income and salvaging her damaged reputation, but also a form of self-expression akin to a sort of stage performance. The Haunted Beach exemplifies Robinson’s efforts to establish herself as a respected poet equal in rank to Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as her catering to a known audience in the wake of Coleridge’s Rime.

For all intents and purposes, Robinson was first known by the public as an actress. She did publish a small collection of poems from jail, Poems, supported by Duchess of Devonshire, but it made little money or critical success (Ockerbloom). Upon her release from debtor’s prison in 1776, Robinson returned to her career as an actress; she debuted as Juliet that December at the Drury Lane Theatre and was an instant success. Her public persona took a new turn after her role as Perdita in A Winter’s Tale, where she first caught the eye of the seventeen year-old Prince of Wales (later King George IV). The press avidly followed his wooing and the subsequent affair (Mellor, 232), publishing cartoons depicting the Prince as an innocent child seduced by an older woman (she was three years his senior) (see Perdita). After less than a year the Prince abandoned Robinson; she, very much in need of money and her reputation already bombarded by the press, demanded 25,000 pounds for the return of his letters. She settled for a smaller amount that George III offered to remove his son from this embarrassment.

The press continued to follow Robinson’s personal life, publishing even her smallest actions in the paper. During the next few years Robinson allegedly had affairs with Lord Malden, the Prince's original emissary, and Charles James Fox, who negotiated the annuity settlement for her. In 1782 Robinson met Colonel Banastre Tarleton who remained her lover for the next 15 years. A cartoon published in 1782 shows Tarleton as an arrogant solider, surpassing the headless Prince of Wales, his headless rival (see Tarleton). The press followed Robinson’s affairs in intimate detail; The Morning Post even published a quip about Robinson’s forgiveness of Tarleton when he “rescued” her from a phaeton accident (see Robinson-Tarleton affair).

As is evident by her whirlwind of pitilessly publicized affairs, Robinson’s early public identity was that of an actress and “fallen woman.” Highly conscious of her public image and its potential power, Robinson used her questionable fame to re-sculpt her tainted image (Pascoe, 173). She reconstructed her past, coloring the events with her side of the story, and successfully created a new identity as a woman of sincere convictions and a respectable author (Pascoe, 173 and Mellor, 240, 244-252). Indeed, Robinson’s efforts seem to have paid off, for later press, biographers and portraits depict her in a much more favorable light. For example, Romney’s 1781 portrait of the actress shows an older, modest woman, properly attired and her face perhaps containing a glimpse of sincere sadness for lack of love (see Robinson by George Romney). Another sympathetic, if melodramatic, portrait is Sir Joshua Reynolds’ 1784 painting of Mary Robinson. He depicts her as an abandoned woman, in a tragic state of quiet despair (see Robinson by Sir Joshua Reynolds). Her turned head gazes out at the ocean in what Mellor sites as an eighteenth century “lost profile” indicating deep wounds of her heart (Mellor 242). Even in her death one elegist remembers Robinson as the “daughter of love,” placing her in a sweet and innocent pastoral scene (see A Pastoral Elegy on the Death of Mrs. Robinson).

Increasing sympathy from the press and Robinson’s contemporaries effectively aided her improving public image and increased receptibility of her written work. In 1788 Robinson returned from her four-year sojourn in France, ready to venture again into the public realm, this time as an author and poet. Robinson’s first poetic phase and her first poetic identity (other than her jail volume of poems) was as “Laura Maria” the Della Cruscan-inspired poet. She was among a series of female poets that wrote in this flowery style, but unlike her contemporaries who feigned indifference to receiving money for their art, Robinson did not have this luxury (Pascoe, 69).

Throughout her writing career, Mary Robinson published under at least seven different pseudonyms, both as an effort to experiment with various forms and as a way of testing out multiple personas. Initially, using pseudonyms could be viewed as a method of avoiding biased criticism that would link her written work to her scandalous past, however, Robinson continued to use them even after her public image improved and her persona as an author and poet is established. Often, she only used the pseudonyms as an initial publication device and later associated her real name with her work. For example, in her 1791 Poems dedication, Robinson revealed herself as the true pen behind the Della Cruscan “Laura Maria,” explaining to her public that she used a pseudonym to ensure an honest audience response (Pascoe, 177).

Robinson’s pseudonyms mark her own development as a writer and parallel the various ideas she tested on the unknowing public. Her multiple pseudonyms used at the Post, “Laura Maria,” Oberon,” “Sappho,” “Julia,” Lesbia,” “Portia,” “Bridget,” and “Tabitha Bramble,” all developed distinctive voices (Pascoe, 174). In her Della Cruscan phase Robinson went by “Laura” and “Laura Maria” and contributed poems to The World, The Oracle, and The Morning Post (Ockerbloom and Pascoe 174). Later in her career she published under the name “Oberon,” her only non-female identity, and wrote poems praising women. In the last three years of her life, under the name “Tabitha Bramble,” Robinson published thirty-nine poems in the Post, all of which differed distinctly in tone and style from her “mellifluous Laura Maria of her Della Cruscan days” (Pascoe, 174). Based on its publication date, “The Haunted Beach” was presumably published under the name “Tabitha” or her married name, Mary Robinson.

As is indicated by her decision to publish under multiple pseudonyms, Robinson was well aware of the complicated nature of audience as well as the publication industry. During her lifetime Robinson boldly challenged many social restrictions imposed on women and publishing poets. In the following quip, “To the New Type of the Morning Post,” published in the Post January 27, 1800, Robinson comments on the press’s capacity to appropriate the poet:
“YE SABLE LEGIONS, her you stand,
A thousand Subjects to command!
All dimly clad in leaden mail,
To triumph o’er you Victim pale!
To blur the white and spotless scene,
And sport your Columns dark between! (Pascoe, 171).

Here Robinson’s friendly, comic verse contains an undercurrent of repression. She compares the printing process to a violent encounter between a masculine printer’s lead and a feminine “white and spotless” blank page. Robinson’s boldness was not limited to her masked identities. Indeed, Robinson was quite successful at creating popular works, and she did not limit herself to the audience’s whim; she also published a series of moral pieces under her own name, including responses to Wollstoncraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” and some of Wordsworth’s poems (Bolton, 746-7). Though it is difficult to determine how widely known Robinson’s pseudonyms were at the time of her writing, she was well known by her own name as a respected and prolific poet. Her works were continually promoted and advertised by the Post. Additionally, fans often wrote in their own poems in response to Robinson’s work (Pascoe, 172). While other poets were also were also promoted by the editor, Daniel Stuart, none so abundantly as Robinson, whose theatrical past made her a captivating poet and celebrity (Pascoe, 172).

Robinson’s somewhat scandalous past did not stop her from surrounding herself with artists, avidly reading contemporary works and engaging with the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Wollstoncraft. Also, much has been made of Robinson’s influence, both as a symbol of urban transgression and a successful poet, on William Wordsworth. Specifically, the central female character in Wordsworth’s Prelude Book Seven is considered to be largely based on Mary Robinson herself (Kramer and Bolton). Robinson’s relationship with Coleridge proved much more fruitful for the poet on a series of levels. They exchanged letters and manuscripts and mutually benefited from shared ideas and poems. Robinson’s The Haunted Beach clearly borrows from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first appearing in print two years earlier.

Though she does not treat her audience in the same forceful tone as Coleridge, her poem shares the mysterious supernatural responses to human action, inexplicable curses, and ethereal ghostly beings and events. The Haunted Beach was first published in the Morning Post on February 2, 1800. Upon reading it in the paper, Coleridge wrote his friend Southey, avidly encouraging him to publish the poem in his “Anthology”:

“She is a woman of undoubted genius. There was a poem of hers in this morning’s paper which both in metre and matter please me much… I thought the metre stimulating and some of the stanzas really good. The first line of the twelfth would of itself redeem a worse poem. I think you will agree with me, but should you not, yet still put it in, my dear fellow!” (Griggs, 91)

Coleridge also pointedly notes Robinson’s influence on Wordsworth; he submitted several of his friend’s poems to the Morning Post with his own explanatory notes. To “The Solitude of Binnorie” Coleridge attached the following explanation: “Sir, it would be unpardonable in the author (Wordsworth) of the following lines if he omitted to acknowledge that the metre (with the exception of the burthen) is borrowed from The Haunted Beach of Mrs. Robinson, a most exquisite poem” (Bolton, 741). (See snip Wordsworth's borrowed metre for full quotation). Coleridge’s public attention to Robinson signals not only her renown amongst contemporary artists but the degree to which her works were discussed in public.

In addition to publicly proclaiming Wordsworth’s indebtedness to Robinson, Coleridge himself maintained a correspondence and poem exchange with the female poet, some of which was published at the time. Coleridge composed a series of poems for and responding to Mary Robinson’s works. His “Perdita,” “Alcaeus to Sappho,” and “The Snow-Drop” (see Coleridge's The Snow-Drop) are all references to one of the poet’s various identities. Robinson, clearly flattered by the interest and influenced by Coleridge’s work, benefited from Coleridge’s encouragement. In addition to her correspondence, she composed “Ode Inscribed to the Infant Son of Coleridge” and To the Poet Coleridge” (Griggs, 92).

As one of the last poems in Robinson’s career, The Haunted Beach is a result of her hard-earned accumulation of audience savvy and literary wisdom. Much of the poem can be read as indicative of Robinson’s relationship with the public. For one, the veiled nature of the poem’s transmission (see Veiled Clarity) is reminiscent not only of Coleridge’s loose ends in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but also of Robinson’s own masks, her many pseudonyms and her assumed roles on the stage (like Perdita). The lack of a knowable narrator mirrors Robinson’s own elusive identity; like the poem’s narrator Robinson is both omnipresent and indefinable. Additionally, her intentional play on Coleridge’s Rime could be indicative of her need for a sure audience. As Robinson financially supported both a husband and a lover, she relied on publishing her work for income.

As is evident in the success of her published works, her engagement of her audience, her correspondence with now-canonized contemporaries, and the abundance of press coverage of her work, Mary Robinson was actively involved in the literary market of her time. Today Robinson’s works are included in anthologies of female Romantics as well as more complete collections of Romanticism. Modern literary critics have scrutinized Robinson as an actress, poet, and author, paying particular attention to her complicated and multi-faceted relationship with her audience.

Ultimately, Robinson’s acute awareness of her own relationship with the public was one of the driving forces of her poetic project. As a former “fallen woman” and actress of the “dirty city” that Wordsworth so lambasted in his works, Robinson consciously reworked her image. She manipulated her audience, testing out various identities and poetic styles, and executing many daring commentaries during her lifetime. Robinson treated the press much like she treated the stage; each poem was a performance that tested a new idea, added to her multi-faceted identity or shaped the developing Romantic canon through her critical response. Like the unidentifiable narrator of The Haunted Beach, Robinson’s true identity remains elusive; today we know her as a blend of her many public selves.

Works Cited:

Bolton, Betsy. “Romancing the Stone: ‘Perdita’ Robinson in Wordsworth's London.” ELH, 64 (Autumn 1997): 727-759.

Chancey, Kristin. University of Florida.
<<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pcraddoc/chancey.htm>>

Durrance, Miles. “The Ghost of S.T. Coleridge in Mary Robinson's The Haunted Beach.” In Ashes, Sparks, and Hypertext: Adventures in Romantic Publication. Spring (2000):
<<http://www.clayfox.com/ashessparks/reports/miles.html>>

Feldman, Paula R, Ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Griggs, Earl Leslie. “Coleridge and Mrs. Mary Robinson.” Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930): 90-95.

Kramer, Lawrence. “Gender and Sexuality in the Prelude: The Question of Book Seven.” ELH 54 (Autumn 1987): 619-637.

Mellor, Anne K. “Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality.” In Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Ed. Coleman, Patrick et al. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2000.

Ockerbloom, Mary Mark, Ed. A Celebration of Women Writers.
<<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/biography.html>>

Pascoe, Judith. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.