Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T06:46:02.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
Series:   Elements in the Gothic

Mary Robinson and the Gothic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2023

Jerrold E. Hogle
Jerrold E. Hogle
Affiliation:
University of Arizona

Summary

Celebrated as an actress on the London stage (1776–80) and notorious as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (1779–80), Mary Darby Robinson had to write to support herself from the mid–1780s until her death in 1800. She mastered a wide range of styles, published prolifically, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post. As her writing developed across the 1790s, she increasingly used the motifs of Gothic fiction and drama descended from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). These came to pervade her late novels and poems so much that she even wrote her autobiography as a Gothic romance. She also deployed them to critique the ideologies of male dominance and the forms of writing in which they appeared. This progression culminated in her final collection of verses, Lyrical Tales (1800), where she Gothically exposes the conflicted underpinnings in the now-famous Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Get access

Keywords

Mary Darby Robinsonthe Gothicthe Rights of WomenFrench Revolutionary writingsthe “English Sappho”
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in the Gothic
Online ISBN: 9781009160889
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 27 April 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Bibliography

Aguirre, Manuel, “Mary Robinson’s ‘The Haunted Beach’ and the Grammar of Gothic,” Neophilologus 98 (2014): 689–704.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993).Google Scholar
Bolton, Betsy, “Romancing the Stone: ‘Perdita’ Robinson in Wordsworth’s London,” English Literary History 64: 3 (1997): 727–759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, William D., “Copies, Protean Role-Players, and Sappho’s Shattered Form in Mary Robinson’s The False Friend,” European Romantic Review 22: 6 (2011): 785–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, William D., “The French Revolution as a Romance: Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac,” Papers on Language and Literature 42: 2 (2006): 115–149.Google Scholar
Castle, Terry, “The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Nussbaum, Felicity and Brown, Laura (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 231–253.Google Scholar
Chandler, James, An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Clery, Emma J., “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,” in Botting, Fred (ed.), Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 23–46.Google Scholar
Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clery, E. J., and Miles, Robert (eds.), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Close, Anne, “Notorious: Mary Robinson and the Gothic,” Gothic Studies 6: 2 (2004): 172–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, edited by Gamer, Michael and Porter, Dahlia (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2008).Google Scholar
Cross, Ashley, Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821 (London: Routledge, 2017).Google Scholar
Curran, Stuart, “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Shiner, Carol and Hoefner, Joel (eds.), Revisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. 14, pp.243–258.Google Scholar
Frye, Roland Mushat, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, edited by Clemit, Pamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, edited by Kramnick, Isaac (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).Google Scholar
Groom, Nick, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Hogle, Jerrold E., “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” in Smith, Allan Lloyd and Sage, Victor (eds.), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 23–33.Google Scholar
Hogle, Jerrold E., “The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales,” The European Legacy 24: 3–4 (2019): 24–34.Google Scholar
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, The Monk, edited by Macdonald, David L. and Scherf, Kathleen (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004).Google Scholar
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Nidditch, Peter H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Longus, The Pastorals, or the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe: The Athenian Society Translation (Cambridge, Ontario: In parentheses, 2002).Google Scholar
Lyotard, Jean François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by George, Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).Google Scholar
Mellor, Anne K., “Mary Robinson and the Scripts of Female Sexuality,” in Coleman, Patrick, Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, and Kowalik, Jill Anne (eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 230–259.Google Scholar
Miles, Robert, Romantic Misfits (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).Google Scholar
Morris, David B., “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History 16: 2 (1985): 299–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary, “Ideology and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’,” Criticism 2: 4 (1979): 307–330.Google Scholar
Radcliffe, Ann, A Sicilian Romance, edited by Milbank, Alison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Radcliffe, Ann, The Italian, edited by Garber, Frederick and Clery, Emma J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 a).Google Scholar
Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho, edited by Dobrée, Bonamy and Castle, Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 b).Google Scholar
Robinson, Mary, A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter, edited by Setzer, Sharon M. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2003).Google Scholar
Robinson, Mary, Selected Poems, edited by Pascoe, Judith (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000).Google Scholar
Russo, Stephanie, “History Repeating: Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in Mary Robinson’s Vancenza and The False Friend,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 37: 1 (2018): 67–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaffer, Julie, “Walsingham: Gender, Pain, Knowledge,” Women’s Writing 9: 1 (2002): 69–85.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96: 2 (1981): 255–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Setzer, Sharon M., “The Gothic Structure of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs,” in Stelzig, Eugene (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 31–47.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by Blakemore, G. Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, edited by Maclean, Hugh (New York: Norton, 1968).Google Scholar
Storch, Rudolf F., “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” English Literary History 34: 2 (1967): 188–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Townshend, Dale, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).Google Scholar
Ty, Eleanor, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, edited by Frank, Frederick S. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2003).Google Scholar
Walpole, Horace, The Letters of Horace Walpole, 4 vols. (Dinslaken: Anboco, 2016). E-Book.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Hagelman, Charles (New York: Norton, 1967).Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Maria and The Wrongs of Woman, edited by Kelly, Gary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Mary Robinson and the Gothic
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Mary Robinson and the Gothic
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Mary Robinson and the Gothic
Available formats
×