O’ER HER PIL’D GRAVE THE GALE OF EVENING SIGHS; AND FLOWERS WILL GROW UPON ITS GRASSY SLOPE. I WIPE THE DIMMING WATER FROM MINE EYES—EV’N IN THE COLD GRAVE DWELLS THE CHERUB HOPE!
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1801
Author’s Note
Much of what you have read in All for Love is based on factual information and on actual occurrences in Mary Robinson’s life, her love affairs, and her brilliant careers as an actress, writer, and feminist. The poetry excerpts are hers, as are the sentences she dictates to Maria from her Letter to the Women of England. The text of most of the letters she exchanged with the Prince of Wales, and Tarleton’s letters to and from his relations, are my own prose and are the gist of that correspondence, based on what modern biographers have written about the subject.
With regard to the strange and mysterious illness Mary suffered subsequent to the late-night carriage ride toward Dover in pursuit of the fleeing Ban Tarleton, medical men at the time arrived at no diagnosis—only the theories and suppositions expressed by the fictional country doctor in my scene at the wayside inn. According to Maria, after a fever that persisted for six months, “the disorder terminated in a violent rheumatism, which progressively deprived her of the use of her limbs.” That would likely have been the medical determination at the time, and the way the friends who knew Mary well described her condition. It is quite possible that Mary might have been afflicted with acute rheumatic fever, which was very prevalent in her day, and which would have, over time, manifested itself in the infirmities from which her contemporaries claimed she endured.
Modern doctors have speculated that Mary suffered from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disease that affects the nerves, the onset of which may have coincided with her carriage accident. For more information on GBS, readers can visit www.jsmarcussen.com/gbs/uk/overview.htm, a Web site that explains the disease in laymen’s terms. There is still no cure for GBS, so even if the syndrome had been discovered and diagnosed in Mary’s day, she would not have been able to recover from it.
Mary Robinson really did have a bone to pick with both literary critics and her publishers, and she channeled her frustration into her novels by putting that dissatisfaction into the mouths of her characters. She truly did complain that “my mental labors have failed through the dishonest conduct of my publishers.” Though her works are read today primarily in the context of women’s studies courses, if at all, she was in fact breaking new ground by incorporating her own life experiences into her poetry and prose.
The friendships I depict in the novel are also based on fact. Mary was mentored by David Garrick, the greatest actor of the age, and performed under Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s auspices at Drury Lane. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, did become her first literary patron, though I took some literary license regarding the impact of this event. In fact, Mr. Robinson’s release from the Fleet was not entirely predicated on the financial success of the volume of Mary’s poetry, publication of which the duchess had sponsored; but the book sales most assuredly made a major contribution to it.
In my novel, Mrs. Robinson’s lovers are the actual personages she was linked with; she did befriend Godwin and Wollstonecraft; and she did indeed discuss poetry—and probably the effects of opium—with that great lotus eater himself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose early efforts she helped usher into print, as the poetry editor of the Morning Post. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth acknowledged the influence on their own work of Mary Robinson’s poetry, particularly her poem “The Haunted Beach,” which employed a new and different meter that inspired Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and other poems of his and of William Wordsworth.
Late in life, Mary Robinson began to write her own memoirs, but died before completing them. When she could not afford paper, she really did scribble her own life story on the versos of correspondence she had saved—letters that had been written to her over the years by other famous or illustrious people. That semiautobiography, which leaves out the juiciest bits regarding Mary’s numerous passionate affairs, abruptly ends just as her liaison with the Prince of Wales is about to pick up speed; and the manuscript was finished by someone else, most probably her daughter. It was published during the first decade of the nineteenth century, and I used it as a springboard from which to find Mary’s voice and immerse myself in her life from her own point of view, and not that of a modern biographer. Most of the events in the book did actually take place. In my efforts to relate some of them in my novel, and remain true to Mary’s own version of them, however, I realized how much Mary must have fictionalized her own autobiography for effect. After all, by the time she began to write her life story, she’d become famous for a style of novel that cheerfully included wildly improbable, and rather gothic, elements.
One such anecdote is Mary’s agonized night flight to Windsor (her first of two fateful nocturnal journeys in the book) after the Prince of Wales has unceremoniously ended their affair. It’s all rather melodramatic, with the mad dash from London in a pony phaeton, a young child as her only postilion, the thwarting of a highwayman on Hounslow Heath (now near Heathrow Airport), and the stop to catch her breath where she realizes that she’s been wearing a costly jewel the entire time and what a lucky escape they had made!
Well…as All for Love is a fictionalization of Mary’s point of view, I let the event stand more or less as she had originally depicted it. Yet I am certain that some of my readers, upon coming
