I collapsed from a fever whilst I scrambled to prepare a second edition, but from my sickbed my maternal bosom swelled with pride at Maria’s twin debuts.
My daughter’s first novel, The Shrine of Bertha, was published on March 22. Those who read it would recognize strains of my voice in Maria’s prose style, and her narrative structure was derivative of my own, but it was to be expected from a maiden effort. The critics were not as kind as I would have wished, but as her doting mother I rejoiced to see that readers were enjoying it.
Maria was making a social splash as well as a literary one. I had never expected her to walk in my footsteps in any way, though it’s a mother’s fondest hope that her child will emulate the good conduct and eschew the bad. I was proud of my daughter’s achievements with the pen, and nearly as pleased with her fashion sense. It was Maria Elizabeth who had set the craze among young women to wear turbans instead of broad-brimmed hats, and to sport the tasseled red Greek caps as well.
One evening she appeared before me in a lovely gentleman’s suit of red velvet, showing to perfection the curve of her slender hips and white-stockinged calves.
“Mummy, how do I look?” she asked, beaming happily.
“And where might you be off to in such attire?”
“A masquerade at Brandenburg House.” She paused to regard my reaction. “Why are you crying, Mum?”
“Because…because you remind me so much of myself when I was your age.” I wiped away a falling tear with my fingertip. How many times had I scandalized the ton by visiting the pleasure gardens in my cross-dressing costumes from Drury Lane?
“You’ll stun them all,” I told Maria; and I meant it as a compliment.
The following morning I read the newspaper accounts of the masquerade at Brandenburg House. Maria was singled out as being among the prettiest young ladies in attendance that evening. I smiled to know that she glittered in the company of many of my old and dear friends—Lord and Lady Melbourne, Fox, Sheridan, Georgiana, and of course the Prince of Wales.
But after the giddy news of March, the rest of 1794 descended downhill with the speed of a runaway stallion. Ban and I quarreled miserably that summer; I was once again supporting his gambling habit from my literary earnings, and his vices claimed every penny faster than I could make them. He was beginning by now to run to fat, nearly gray at forty. He rarely rode anymore, and had all but given up his other beloved sporting pastimes of cricket, tennis, and boxing. I had suffered the same laggardly behavior from my husband; why should I continue to conscience it in a lover?
Unable to face another week of his stumbling home after a long night of cards and drink, in mid-August I packed up and moved back to our cottage in Old Windsor—with Maria, of course. But no sooner did I place one toe over the threshold than I began to miss Ban dreadfully. I poured my longing into a series of forty-four sonnets titled Sappho and Phaon, writing as if I were Sappho, betrayed and abandoned by her male lover. I was no longer writing in the florid mode of the Della Cruscans. That literary fashion was now passé, replaced in the public’s esteem and taste with a considerably less baroque poetic style.
The sestet from the eighteenth sonnet in the Sappho cycle expresses the anguish I bore in my heartsick soul:
Why art thou chang’d? dear source of all my woes!
Though dark my bosom’s tint, through ev’ry vein
A ruby tide of purest lustre flows,
Warm’d by thy love, or chill’d by thy disdain;
And yet no bliss this sensate Being knows;
Ah! why is rapture so allied to pain?
The annus horribilis continued. Ban returned to Old Windsor, but then we had another spat, more ferocious than the previous one, and he took off for London again.
Maria endeavored to cheer me, filling every room with fragrant blossoms until the air hung with a heady perfume. She encouraged me to get out of bed and walk about as much as possible, but I found safety in the confines of my four-poster oaken bed and the worn-out eiderdown in which I cocooned myself no matter the season, for the cottage was always drafty.
“What can I do to dull the pain, Mama?” my daughter asked.
“Bring me laudanum, my sweet. Use Dr. Sydenham’s formula this time.”
“You must forgive me for not recalling it.” I could see that she was stalling for time.
“Strain into a pint of canary wine two ounces of opium, an ounce of saffron, and a dram of cinnamon and cloves.”
“Perhaps we’ll try that recipe tomorrow. I think you’ve had enough for today; it makes you too morose.”
“The laudanum is not to blame; it is the critics. The best they could say about the volume of Poems published in January was”—and here I mimicked a snooty reviewer—“‘Many of Mrs. Robinson’s poems relate to incidents in her own connexions and are proudly plaintive.’ They deride me for writing for money. As if earning a living by my pen is something vulgar and low. Why is it considered ladylike to scribble away in the privacy of one’s home, but not to put forward the same efforts for the public eye? They have been so unkind of late that I would sooner open a vein and bleed before them than ever pen another line.”
I glanced at the sheaves of paper scattered upon nearly every surface of the room. There was not even a chair where one could sit, or a table where one might enjoy a cup of tea. The cabriole legs of my pretty French bedstead swam in a sea of discarded manuscript pages. “I might as well toss my works in progress on the fire as well. Fuel is dear and we haven’t got any money.”
Maria plumped my bolster and smoothed the counterpane before settling down on
