Political Radicalism and Feminism

Engraving by J.R. Smith, after a portrait by George Romney, from the frontispiece of the 1895 edition of Mary Robinson's memoirs.

Portrait of Marie Antoinette during her imprisonment by the Marquis de Brehan.

Robinson's belief in the potential influence and social responsibility of the poet is essential to her placement among the Romantics. During her involvement with the Della Cruscans, she showed that she shared in the clique's support for the French revolutionaries with her 1790 poem dedicated to Robert Merry, "Ainsi Va Le Monde." Robinson predicts a glorious future of freedom in the wake of revolution, writing in the final stanza, "Hark! Freedom echoes thro' the vaulted skies./The Goddess speaks! O mark the blest decree,--/TYRANTS SHALL FALL--TRIUMPHANT MAN BE FREE!" (In the 1806 edition of the Memoirs, Mary Elizabeth Robinson deleted this stanza, along with the dedication to Merry, as part of her effort to distill her mother's legacy from the taint of the Della Cruscans.)

By 1793, Robinson, like her fellow late-eighteenth century radicals, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, was disillusioned by The Reign of Terror. She wrote her "Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France" for Marie Antoinette, whom she had met during a 1783 trip to France. According to Robinson's daughter in the Memoirs, the Queen was much taken with the Englishwoman and made her a gift of a purse (195). Robinson responds to her acquaintance's execution by bemoaning,

Who can reflect, nor drop the tenderest tear,
On the dread progress of thy fate severe!
Hurl'd from the loftiest height of human bliss,
To the worst horrors of Despair's abyss!
To bear th' insulting cruelty of those,
Who, from thy subjects, to thy Tyrants rose!

As the sentimental concerns of the Della Cruscan poet are turned to the guillotine's victims, the formerly pressing necessity for righting the social order falls by the wayside. However, by the time of her death, Robinson does not seem to have entirely turned away from her republican principles or utopian hopes as did the Lake Poets over time. The posthumously published "The Progress of Liberty" continues to decry the way "Rebellion then/ Usurp'd the form of Freedom, whose bland soul/Shrunk at the boundless and licentious rage/Of lawless innovation." But the poet continues to hold out hope for a more meaningful and peaceful revolution that will result in a communal future. She writes,
 
[...]Prophetic hope
Beholds the heavenly vision, bleeding France,
Where o'er thy blooming vales and tawny hills
Thy pine-clad summits and thy yellow plains,
Thy peaceful tribes shall rove. The laughing throng,
Link'd in the bonds of social amity,
Live for each other" (82-3).

This utopian thinking was related to Robinson's project of exalting the place of the poet in general, and especially the woman writer. In the preface to her collection,Sappho and Phaon, she writes, "That poetry ought to be cherished as a national ornament, cannot be more strongly exemplified than in the single fact, that, in those centuries when the poets' laurels have been most generously fostered in Britain, the minds and manners of the natives have been most polished and enlightened" (12). Robinson thus participates in the construction of the narrative of the Romantic poet as an agent and provoker of liberal social progress. She sums up that position by arguing, "It is the interest of the ignorant and powerful, to suppress the effusions of enlightened minds: when only monks could write, and nobles read, authority rose triumphant over right; and the slave, spell-bound in ignorance, hugged his fetters without repining. It was then that the best powers of reason lay buried like the gem in the dark mine; by a slow and tedious progress they have been drawn forth, and must, ere long, diffuse an universal lustre: for that era is rapidly advancing, when talents will tower like an unperishable column, while the globe will be strewed with the wrecks of superstition" (14-5). 


The literature of sensibility becomes a liberating force in the face of political, economic, and gender-based-oppression. McGann writes, "[Robinson] takes it for granted--as everyone else at the time did--that sensibility is a feminized 'experience'. She is equally aware, however, that the philosophical discourse of sensibility has been dominantly masculine" (98). By seizing and altering that discourse, Robinson reveals that writing can serve as a path to liberation for women who have been oppressed by the patriarchal social order. She argues in her Letter to the Women of England, "The embargo upon words, the enforcement of tacit submission, has been productive of consequences highly honourable to the women of the present age. Since the sex have been condemned for exercising the powers of speech, they have successfully taken up the pen: and their writings exemplify both energy of mind, and capability of acquiring the most extensive knowledge. The press will be the monuments [sic] from which the genius of British women will rise to immortal celebrity: their works will, in proportion as their educations are liberal, from year to year, challenge an equal portion of fame, with the labours of their classical male contemporaries" (90-1). The list she gives of women writers in "On the Subordination of Women" constructs those individuals as a heroic company, amongst which she is pleased to place her real name. With the Lyrical Tales, she would seek to prove her point, by seizing her proper position at the forefront of English verse.

Works Cited

McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.


Robinson, Mary. A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. London: Longman and Rees, 1799. Full Text.

-- Sappho and Phaon. London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1796. Full Text.