My portable writing desk contains a rogues’ gallery—a repository of portraits of the seducers who shaped my destiny. As I made myself, so they remade me, and from this clay emerged—I am pleased to admit—a rather extraordinary creature, a rara avis even among other outrageous birds of plumage: recognized, if not admired; admired, if not loved; loved, if not tenderly cherished; tenderly cherished, if not ultimately abandoned.
I laugh to consider that I suffered so many reversals of fate and fame before my fortieth year that one might call me a female Job. But each time I found myself on the downswing of Dame Fortune’s wheel, I gripped it with all my might and through my wits and wiles managed to ride it back up toward the stars. I have lived during an age of great inventions. My greatest invention, refined every few years into something more worthy of a permanent legacy to society, has been myself.
Verily, my life has been the stuff of gothic novels—born during a tempest, my crusted eyelids first lighting upon a cheerless room in the shadow of a Bristol churchyard, where the ponderous tones of the organ were my earliest lullabies. No wonder that as a child I derived odd comfort from the mournful and the melancholy, seeking solace in my casemented chamber whilst the wind whipped and whistled around the dark pinnacles of the St. Augustine monastery’s minster tower! Even my mother had to agree that I was destined for high drama. In fact, it would not be a falsehood to say that every event of my life has borne the hallmarks of too acute a sensibility.
We have a superstition in the Theatre that the first role a performer assays comes to define him in his private life. For my most famous role as well as my “lost” reputation, the public dubbed me “the Perdita,” but in truth I was closer to poor Jane Shore, the cast-off mistress of an English monarch. It was as Jane Shore that I first attracted the attention of Mr. Hussey, my tutor at Oxford House; and it was the role in which I auditioned for Mr. Thomas Hull and for my dear mentor David Garrick, my affinity for the character arising from the unhappy circumstances of my childhood and my father’s abandonment of my mother. Jane Shore’s plea to right the wrongs perpetrated by the laws of man against womankind subconsciously became my own. How could I ever have prognosticated that in some respects my own trajectory would so closely mirror Mistress Shore’s?
It was Mr. Garrick who would always remind me that “an actor’s name is writ in water.” True enough indeed, for anyone’s memories of my performances at Drury Lane have long ago drifted away and become commingled with the sea. But as a writer, I should like to think that my words are writ in stuff far less elusive. I should like to think that, even if only in my epitaph, my words are writ in stone.
Afterword
By late December 1800, Mary Robinson was suffering from dropsy, a swelling of the soft tissues of the body due to the accumulation of excess water. The condition was nearly suffocating her. “Poor heart, what will become of thee?” she murmured to Maria. “Should I recover, I wish to commence a lengthy work on which I shall bestow great pains as well as time.” She acknowledged that Miss Wollstonecraft—and her critics—were often correct, adding, “Most of my writings have been composed in too much haste.”
On Christmas Eve, Mary asked her daughter, “How near is Christmas Day?”
“Tomorrow, Mother,” replied Maria.
“Yet I shall never see it.”
Even at the very last, Mary Robinson somehow stage-managed her life. Toward midnight, she cried out in pain, “O
God! Just and merciful God, help me support this agony!”
On Christmas evening, she sank into a stupor; her final words, summoning Maria, were a whispered “My darling Mary.” She lapsed into a coma and breathed her last at noon on December 26.
A few days prior to her decease, Mary Robinson collected and arranged her poetical works and her memoirs and bound her daughter by a solemn abjuration to see them published. Of the memoirs, Mary told Maria, “I should have continued it up to the present time, but perhaps it is well that I have been prevented. Promise me that you will print it.”
Shortly after her death, two persons received a lock of the author’s auburn hair: Banastre Tarleton and the Prince of Wales. It was said of the latter that he bore Mary’s hair in his own coffin.
The Sun published an obituary, and Mary was buried as she had requested, with little fanfare in Old Windsor. Only two mourners walked behind her coffin—William Godwin and the poet Peter Pindar. Maria Elizabeth was not present, as it was not the fashion of the day for women to attend funerals, no matter how close their relation to the deceased. The Reverend—and romantic poet—Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered the benediction.
Her gravestone bears an uncharacteristically pedestrian legend for a woman who enjoyed such celebrity during her rich and colorful life. The actress-courtesan-poetess-novelist-feminist’s epitaph says merely:
MRS.
MARY ROBINSON
AUTHOR OF POEMS,
AND OTHER LITERARY WORKS,
DIED THE 26TH OF DECEMBER, 1800,
AT ENGLEFIELD COTTAGE,
IN SURREY,
AGED 43 YEARS.
Maria Elizabeth Robinson remained at Englefield and completed her mother’s memoirs. She never married, instead residing there for many years with Elizabeth Weale, a female companion she referred to as “my most excellent Bessie,” and who came to stay at Englefield Cottage during Mary’s last few months. Maria left her entire estate to Miss Weale upon her own demise in 1818.
During the 1790s, Mr. Robinson dropped out of Mary’s life entirely. The remainder of his life is a mystery.
POOR DEAR MRS. ROBINSON…THAT THAT
