Famous for being famous
Sarah Burton
THE PRINCE’S MISTRESS: A LIFE OF MARY ROBINSON by Hester Davenport Sutton, £20, pp. 274, ISBN 0750932279 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 PERDITA: THE LIFE OF MARY ROBINSON by Paula Byrne HarperCollins, £20, pp. 477, ISBN 0007164602 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 PERDITA: ROYAL MISTRESS, WRITER, ROMANTIC by Sarah Gristwood Bantam, £20, pp. 409, ISBN 0593052080 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Mary Robinson: actress, poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and London bus. One could wait over a century for a biography of her and then three come along at once. Had London buses existed in Robinson’s lifetime, contemporary satirists would have leapt at the analogy, as it was widely believed that anyone who could afford the fare could have a ride. Robinson was best known not for her thespian or her literary talents, but for being a grande horizontale, most notably as the first mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV).
Mary Robinson was born Mary Darby somewhere between 1756 and 1758 (the first of many characteristic obfuscations) and, at around the age of 15, married inadvisedly. Both she and her husband had little in common above being strangers to economy and soon had money problems which induced Mr Robinson to turn a blind eye (if not an abetting hand) to his wife’s succession of lovers bearing gifts. The Prince of Wales was doubtless not the first but the most famous of these, and after a hectic 12 months of torrid passion dumped Robinson with the savage suddenness which was to become his hallmark.
This left Robinson less heartbroken than plain broke: an ornament herself, a prince’s mistress was expected to put on a show of conspicuous consumerism, and Robinson had done just that, commissioning clothes, furnishings, and carriages for which she never expected to foot the bill. Social hypocrisy aside, it was widely accepted that a cast-off mistress had every reason to expect an annuity, or at least a settlement, from her ex-lover as a kind of recompense for her loss of value as a marriageable or marketable commodity. The Prince was only induced to honour his end of the bargain when Robinson reminded him that she had letters in her possession which might prove highly embarrassing to the future king.
The Prince probably first set eyes on Robinson in the theatre. (The name Perdita, after one of the roles she played, stuck as fast as Posh or Becks.) Garrick himself had groomed her for the stage, where her beauty as much as her talent bought her four seasons in the limelight. The Town and Country Magazine reflected:
If she was not remarkably excellent as an actress, she was at least so happy as never to be remarkably deficient in any part she attempted; she seldom played without applause.
And indeed this could have been said of her efforts in her second career as a woman of letters.
The cause of this change of direction was tragic. In the course of a typically dramatic dash after her then lover, the war hero Banastre Tarleton (the man who could be said to have loved her best, probably most, and certainly longest their relationship was to last 15 years), she suffered a mysterious attack of illness which left her semi-paralysed from the waist down. She was 26 years old.
No longer the marketable beauty or the stage commodity, Robinson concentrated thereafter on writing, turning out seven novels, hundreds of poems and various essays. While her work drew the admiration of the likes of Coleridge and Mary Wollstonecraft, it was always with qualification: she wrote rapidly and without discipline, trusting to the originality and energy of her style rather than paying the reader the compliment of a second draft. (Byrne and Gristwood are strong on analysis of her work, both from a critical and a biographical perspective.) In this reincarnation as a literary figure, Robinson hungered for the recognition which could revise the reputation she had gained in her early years (‘AMBITION fires my breast!’) and these three biographies set themselves the same task. Byrne makes the greatest claims for literature’s debt to Robinson, suggesting that she may have anticipated Coleridge, De Quincey and Keats in discussing the effects of opiates in poetry, and approvingly cites one modern critic’s claim that ‘Tennyson’s “Mariana” could not have been written without Mary Robinson’s experiments to create a new lyric form in English verse’. That her presence was felt in the Romantic landscape is undeniable (Wordsworth even considered changing the title of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads to avoid confusion with — or contamination by — Robinson’s own collection, Lyrical Tales), but whether her work is deserving of the degree of attention it is currently being paid remains a largely unasked question.
Her most interesting writing, whether in her novels or her essays, is on the subject of women’s place in the world. Her self-promotion (which can be toe-curling, especially in her poetry) is here more appropriately channelled as a voice for her sex rather than herself, and is both angry and articulate in its denunciation of the double standard. Otherwise, she was an unexceptional actress, a substandard dramatist, a tolerable poet and a novelist who attracted popularity rather than regard. Had she not had such a rackety past, she would have excited less attention than she has.
Robinson was a true celebrity: the public was fascinated by what she wore, where she went and whom she slept with (a substantial list, including the politician Charles James Fox); she was famous for being famous. Her subsequent desire to be recognised for real achievements was never to be fulfilled. Had she been satisfied with less, she would doubtless have been happier; as the radical John Wilkes averred, ‘Life can little else supply/ But just a few good fucks and then we die.’
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