Yet God did not see fit to grant me too many months of happiness, for in August 1793, my mother departed from this world after a brief illness. Maria and I nursed her as best we could after the doctor bled her and advised us to keep her comfortable.
She grew frailer and frailer with each passing day, and by the end of a week she resembled a tiny sparrow with large searching blue eyes. One evening she refused the soup I had brought for her supper.
“You mustn’t,” I said softly, as she pushed the spoon away. “You need your nourishment.”
“Not where I’m going,” she replied, her voice small and faint. Mother reached for my hand and asked for her devotional. I placed the little prayer book in her hands, and suddenly recognized it as one of the gifts Mr. Robinson had brought her when he was trying to woo me.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Mother said, clutching the book. “I never wished you any ill. I always wanted the best for you.” She beckoned for me to come closer. I bent down and she kissed my forehead as if she were bestowing a benediction. “You have suffered much,” Mother whispered. “But God has given you beauty, immense talent, and a loving heart. Use them well. And make sure Maria Elizabeth knows how much I love you both.”
She closed her eyes and let the prayer book rest atop her chest, which soon ceased its rhythmic rise and fall, her death in itself a metric stanza.
She did not open her eyes again.
I had become an orphan.
Disconsolate by her passing, I took to my own bed. Though Mother and I had been occasionally at loggerheads, she was most tenderly loved and sincerely lamented. A special bond was forged between us from the first hour of Father’s failure and estrangement from his family, a bond no son, however close, could understand.
I knew not how I might thrive without her. I was in no condition to face the world, sure I should never be cheerful again.
By the fall of 1793, Ban, Maria, and I were ensconced at Old Windsor.
We had decided to find a quieter place to reside, where the country air and a patch of green to admire would be more healthful and relaxing than London’s hurly-burly, yet would enable us to return to town within the day.
Charming Englefield Cottage filled the bill to perfection. The grounds abutted the edge of Great Windsor Park. Not only had Englefield Green become a fashionable summer venue for the gentry, but I was now the prince’s neighbor, the Great Park the only separation between my former royal lover’s abode and my own. When all was said and done, I suppose I have never entirely been able to relinquish a sense of proximity to that noble man who had so affected my destiny.
Though I supplied the funds to purchase the cottage, the deed was put in Maria’s name, that she would always have a home should any disaster befall me, and upon my eventual demise.
France had declared war on England, and to my relief, Ban, who had badly sprained his knee that September, had not been well enough to run off and join the fray. One day I slipped from my crutches, injuring my legs and hip. What a doddering pair of cripples we made, and neither of us yet forty.
Though I was quite the success as a poetess, there were days so painful that only laudanum and Ban’s love got me from dawn to sunset. His passion—and of course my daughter’s devotion—were the only sure things in my life, as every week I was inculcated with an object lesson in the nature of fame. My poems were being printed in India, sold at a guinea apiece. And “Lines to Him Who Will Understand Them” had been set to music and was now a popular tune in London drawing rooms and throughout the world. As Britain’s finest mistress of lyrical poetry, I was hailed as “the English Sappho.”
But one success was no guarantee of another. My old friend Sheridan, as well as the manager of the Royal Haymarket, rejected my opera Kate of Aberdeen, an opus for which I’d had high hopes.
Nonetheless, I was carving a niche for myself in the pantheon of lady authors, writing, as with much of my poetry, from my own experiences, whilst my sister scribblers, such as Mrs. Burney, composed fantastical gothic novels that combined the sort of rollicking adventures one might read in Sterne or Smollet with the morality tales of Hannah More.
On Valentine’s Day, 1794, my second novel, The Widow, or a Picture of Modern Times, was published. By March, the entire first edition of three thousand copies had sold out—and the fashionable women of London were up in arms at the effrontery I had displayed by holding the mirror up to nature, depicting them in their follies and vices as the shallow, grasping, and voracious creatures they too often were. When one character assails another for daring to equate her recognized literary talent with that of rank, I was writing from the depths of my own experiences, exploring a theme that would become one of my touchstones: satirizing a society that places birth
