Mary Darby Robinson
1758–1800 · English actress, poet and novelist
Mary Robinson (Bristol, 1758 by her own account, though recent research points to 1757; died 1800) was an English actress, poet, dramatist and novelist. She is remembered above all for her stage career in the late eighteenth century and for a body of verse that made her one of the most widely read women writers of her day.
The daughter of a sea captain who left the family, she grew up in straitened circumstances. She married young to Thomas Robinson, whose supposed fortune never materialised, and she had to support the household herself. While her husband was imprisoned for debt, she published her first poems in 1775. Her later triumph at Drury Lane as Perdita in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale drew the attention of the Prince of Wales. After a brief affair, the prince dropped her, and she went on to a fifteen-year relationship with the soldier Banastre Tarleton. A rheumatic fever in 1783 left her partly paralysed, and from then on she devoted herself mainly to writing: poems, novels that earned more than her verse, and essays on women's rights. She died in 1800 with her memoirs unfinished; her daughter published them. After her death, her personal reputation overshadowed her work during the Victorian era.
Key works
- Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1775), her first published book, written partly during her time in prison.
- Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity (1792), a Gothic novel about deception and naivety.
- Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796), a Gothic novel set in the eighteenth century.
- Sappho and Phaon (1796), a sequence of sonnets on the myth of Sappho.
Curiosities
A stage name
Her performance as Perdita in 1779 gave her the nickname by which she became known. It also inspired a fashion for loose muslin gowns based on Greek statuary.
Pupil of David Garrick
According to her own memoirs, the actor David Garrick, by then retired, agreed to train her in acting when she was about fifteen.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.