Robinson (née Darby), Mary

Mary Robinson, née Darby (1757?–1800), actress, courtesan, and fashionable trendsetter, was also a poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist whose social and literary lives were entwined. From the mid-1770s through the 1790s, she performed for four seasons on the London stage; conducted affairs with notables such as the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and Banastre Tarleton; and wrote scores of poems, several dramas, eight novels, numerous pamphlets and essays, a translation, and a memoir. Though she never overcame the obloquy of her extramarital relations, she cultivated public sympathy and achieved literary fame, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge pronouncing her “a woman of undoubted Genius” (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey (25 Jan. 1800). In: Griggs, E.L. (ed.), The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 562–564, 1956–1971, 1:562). Current scholarship on Robinson is focused on recovering her impact and legacy, with attention to her contributions in myriad arenas, including celebrity and media culture, theatre and performance history, sexuality and gender identity, early feminism, revolutionary discourse, Gothic literature, life writing, cultural commentary, and poetics.