Mary Robinson

Image Source

Robinson poems in RAP

The Haunted Beach

• Events that Inspired Haunted Beach (according to a friend)

The Snow-Drop

Related poems

Coleridge's The Snow-Drop

Wordsworth's Snow-Drop Poems

Peter Pindar's A Pastoral Elegy on the Death of Mrs. Robinson

Robinson Images in RAP

Perdita

Tarleton

Portrait of Robinson by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Portrait of Robinson by George Romney

Essays in RAP on Mary Robinson:

• Veiled Clarity, a close reading of transmission in Robinson's The Haunted Beach
  
• Robinson and Her Many Masks a study of Robinson's complicated relationship with the public and its effects on the publication history of her The Haunted Beach
  
• Coleridge vs. Robinson compares The Haunted Beach and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  

Online reserve reading

Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace

Other sites of interest:

• Robinson's 1791 Poems (Scroll down for poem contents and full text links)
• a wonderful site that includes the text and digital copies of actual pages and engravings from the Memoirs. Courtesty of UPENN Also check out the Biographical Info on the same site
  
• Durrance, Miles. “The Ghost of S.T. Coleridge in Mary Robinson's The Haunted Beach.” In Ashes, Sparks, and Hypertext: Adventures in Romantic Publication.
  
• Chancey, Kristin. University of Florida. Her Analysis of Robinson
  

Biographical Information:

Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800)

• borned and raised in Bristol, daughter of whaling captain from America
• educated at Hannah More's sisters' school and then Meribah Lorington's academy
• April 1774 married to Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk
• 1775 Mary, her daughter and husband imprisoned for debt
• began writing poetry in jail, first volume, Poems, was published in 1775
• upon her release she became an actress at Drury Lane Theatre
• her most famous roles include: Ophelia, Viola, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth and Perdita
• she has an affair with Prince of Wales; he abandons her a year later and fails to pay her the full promised annuity
• 1784 leaves for the continent with lover Colonel Bastre Tarleton, a veteran of the American war
• returns to England 1778
• 1883 paralyzed from waist down due to miscarriage
• remained with Tarleton until 1798, he left at her mother’s insistence
• died Dec 1800 after completing only half her memoirs

Press coverage of Robinson-Tarleton affair

Robinson as an author and poet

• she contributed to the Morning Post under name of Tabitha Bramble and 7 other pseudonyms
  
• Coleridge sent her his manuscript Kubla Khan, which inspired her to write Mrs Robinson to the Poet Coleridge
  
• Her The Snow-Drop prompted Coleridge’s poem of the same name
  
• Robinson's Ode inscribed to the Infant Son of S. T. Coleridge, moved him to write A Stranger Minstrel
  
• she entitled her last collected poems book Lyrical Tales (1800) after Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, which almost led Wordsworth to change the title of the second edition of his work to "Poems by W. Wordsworth"; as Dorothy Wordsworth explains it: "Mrs. Robinson has claimed the title and is about publishing a volume of Lyrical Tales. This is a great objection to the former title, particularly as they are both printed at the same press and Longman is the publisher of both the works."
  
• Wordsworth copied the metre of Robinson's The Haunted Beach in his poem The Solitude of Binnorie; Coleridge points this out in his letter to the Morning Post where he addresses Wordsworth's borrowed metre
  
• she wrote The Haunted Beach a few months before her death after viewing murdered body disposed of on the beach at night (see her friend's account: Events that Inspired Haunted Beach )
  
• on his first reading The Haunted Beach Coleridge told Southey to include in his Annual Anthology: “it falls off sadly to the last - wants tale and interest; but the images are new and very distinct—that “silvery carpet” is so just that it is unfortunate it should seem to bad, for it is really good- but the metre- aye, that woman has an ear.”