The first edition was printed on May 12, 1791, handsomely bound in mahogany-colored leather tooled in gold. I had secured a whopping six hundred subscribers in sixteen weeks, a veritable catalogue of the titled and influential; the list, printed within the volume, was headed by none other than my former royal paramour, His Highness, the Prince of Wales. The names of several other royals followed George’s, and of course dear Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, was there, along with Fox, Sheridan, Reynolds, the poets Peter Pindar and Robert Merry, and many, many members of the ton. But what brought both smiles and tears to my face was the inclusion on the list of twenty-one of Ban’s friends and relatives in Liverpool—proof positive that Jane Tarleton was no longer ashamed to have my name linked with hers.
The critics were quite kind, seeing in my verses the seeds of a new literary movement, which they dubbed Romanticism. I was charting new territory, among the first to plumb the deepest recesses of my own experience and mine the ore I found there. Unlike those of my fellow scribblers, my stanzas were both autobiographical and intensely personal. It was an age when Nature was considered one of the rare permissible outlets for emotion, and in my poetical lines I employed Her many attributes as the theme for my personal turmoil and travail. She was as much a character as the humans I invoked.
That summer, Maria and I ventured to Bath, whilst Ban remained in London, spending most of his time entering his name in the betting books at Brooks’s—when he was not chasing the charms of another woman. He had left me once again, taking a suite of rooms not far from his favorite haunts in St. James’s. No sooner had his mother accepted our ménage, after so many years of insults, than my lover made a mockery of our victory. His betrayal stung like a whipping.
“I thought you despaired to be without him, Mummy,” Maria confoundedly observed, as arm in arm we strolled past fashionable pedestrians in the North Parade. My daughter was keen on my enjoying a daily constitutional despite my disabilities.
“I despair more to imagine him in another’s arms,” I replied softly. “He has begun to stray toward some low caprice, I fear.”
“Don’t cry,” my daughter softly said, drawing me closer beside her. “Ten of him is not worth one of you.” And finally she bravely spoke the words that I realized she’d long feared to voice. “I do not much care for Colonel Tarleton.”
My face was bathed in tears. “If only I could feel the same way, my sweet.”
“He is naught but bluff and bluster, with no substance underneath,” she added soothingly, thinking, I suppose, that she was cheering me. We ceased our promenade whilst she searched her pockets for a handkerchief.
“Then is there another man I’ve known whom you would prefer to see my paramour?”
Maria shook her head without giving the matter a second thought. “Not a one, Mum. Every man-jack of them has used you ill.”
“Wherever do you learn such language?” I chuckled ruefully. But I knew the answer; she’d been living with a soldier for years. There was a part of my soul that acknowledged, of course, that Maria’s words were not ill reasoned. By now she was sixteen years of age; I’d not been much older when I’d given birth to her. Perhaps she realized—if only by the unfamiliar physical sensations a girl experiences at such an age—that I knew precisely what it was about Ban Tarleton that made me take him back time after time. I permitted myself to swallow his falsehoods because he made my body feel so exquisite when I was nestled in his embrace. There seemed to be no magic sufficiently strong to rescue me from the power he had over my senses.
But the change of scene and the waters of Bath had availed little. On our return to London, my thoughts were so given over to Ban’s desertion that I was utterly exhausted, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I had no appetite for anything, whether it be food or gaiety.
At Maria’s suggestion, I took up writing prose. Drafting a novel would distract me from my anguish, though I reminded my daughter that it was not considered a respectable occupation for a woman. “We may compose poetry and publish it to our heart’s content—but novel writing is considered too vulgar.”
“What rubbish,” Maria exclaimed. “No doubt it is an ugly rule invented by envious male novelists to secure all the thunder for themselves. And besides,” she added with a chuckle, “you are no stranger to the taint of vulgarity.”
So all through the autumn months I scratched away with my quill, and when my fingers ached too much from rheumatic complaints, I dictated the narrative to Maria.
My maiden voyage, Vancenza, or The Dangers of Credulity, was published on the second of February, 1792. As with my poetry, I tapped the wellspring of experience, this time exploring the plight of a royal mistress.
The public, eager for such a roman à clef from Mrs. Robinson’s pen, scrambled to obtain a copy, and the entire edition sold out in a single day! So avid remained the readers to glean any secrets about the sexual proclivities of the Prince of Wales, however fictionally veiled, that four subsequent editions of Vancenza were snapped up just as rapidly. And Maria entered my study brandishing the daily papers as if they were medieval pennants, eager to read me the notices.
“Mummy, I have the Monthly Review for March,” she announced one day, and began to quote it before I could even make the request. “‘Vancenza, it is true, is not written in the simple style, but it is written, and in our opinion well written, in the style of elegance peculiar
