by Paula Byrne
Lord Denmore has avowed his attachment to another; he is regardless of my sorrows; he insults my pride; he wounds my sensibility. There are moments when I experience an agitation of mind, which menaces my reason. I endeavour to methodize my feelings; I summons the resisting powers of pride and scorn; they do not calm my feverish brain; they agitate its fibres almost to frenzy … Oh, sensibility! thou curse to woman! thou bane of all our hopes, thou source of exultation to our tyrant man! How abject dost thou render even the most exalted minds; how decidedly dost thou fasten on the senses; how inevitably dost thou annihilate all that is dignified and noble … Are not even its raptures agonizing? Does not the tumult of excessive joy inflict a degree of agitation which amounts to pain? Will not an act of generosity experienced thrill through the brain, excite our tears, convulse the bosom, and convey through every fibre a sense of torturing ecstasy? … there is no soothing opiate for the mind but apathy: to feel is to be wretched.8
As in Mary’s other novels, the man upon whom the woman lavishes her affections turns out to be unworthy. Gertrude reflects on man’s dominion over woman: ‘if we permit one object to influence every thought, to control every sentiment, to usurp an undivided dominion over our subjugated faculties … whether that object be the lover or the friend is of little importance; he holds the reins of government over our senses’; ‘One hour I hate Lord Denmore … the next, my soul relapses into sadness, and the affections of the heart triumph over all the claims of reason … you will scarcely believe that it is possible to love and to hold in abhorrence the same object, and at the same moment.’9
The Anti-Jacobin Review was wrong in its contention that ‘the author delights in presenting situations, in which passion, especially the passion of love, triumphs over virtue and reason’.10 In her next novel, Mary would write a poem in which Love and Reason fight it out and Reason triumphs because he has Time on his side. As a novelist, Mary was more interested in the conflict between reason and passion than the resolution; her heroines are often found struggling between sense and sensibility. The Anti-Jacobin Review was right to say that The False Friend showed an interest in ‘morbid sensibility’, but failed to perceive the point that it is Gertrude’s sensibility which destroys her, much as Mary Robinson presents herself in the Memoirs as a victim of ‘too acute a sensibility’. For Mary, the problem was that, on the one hand, ‘The heart must love, or it will be dead to every noble, every sublime propensity’, but on the other, in order to survive in the world of men a woman had to learn to be a ‘calmly thinking being, who can weigh the affections of the heart against the proprieties of Reason’.11
‘I shall preach, and I shall never fail to feel those precepts which have been inculcated by one who now sleeps in the grave … whose monument is built on the immortal basis which supports the rights of woman.’
‘Preposterous!’ exclaimed Mr Treville: ‘woman is merely a domestic creature; take her from the humble avocations of life, and she becomes—
‘Your equal!’ interrupted I. ‘If I speak individually at the present moment, I may add – your superior.’12
This was not Tarleton’s attitude to women: he never attempted to confine Mary to the domestic sphere and always supported her writing. But perhaps in the end he did her a favour by leaving her: he showed her that she did not need a man. ‘It is adversity alone that unfolds the page of knowledge,’ she wrote in The False Friend. ‘It is truth alone that can sustain the mind.’ From this point forward, it was the mind alone – bolstered by the company of like-minded friends and a self-sacrificing daughter – that sustained Mary.
The end of the affair was the making of her as a feminist. The False Friend is in many ways more a response to the death of Mary Wollstonecraft than an outpouring of feelings about Tarleton. As a worried columnist in the Gentleman’s Magazine would soon write, ‘Mrs R. avows herself of the school of Wollstonecroft [sic]; and that is enough for all who have any regard to decency, order, or prudence, to avoid her company.’13
In January 1798, just four months after his wife’s death, William Godwin had published a selection of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works together with a biography of her called Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It may have been the appearance of this book that gave Mary Robinson the idea of starting her own memoirs. The unworldly Godwin wanted to tell the truth about Wollstonecraft’s life before anyone else sought to discredit her memory with a scandalmongering biography. So he made public Wollstonecraft’s love affairs, pregnancies, suicide attempts, and atheism. The book provoked a storm in the Tory press. Godwin was taunted as a pimp and Wollstonecraft branded a whore.
Mary almost certainly realized at this point that it would do her no good to publish her version of the affair with the Prince. She put her memoirs aside and concentrated on preparing her collected poems and writing The False Friend instead. She took on the mantle of Wollstonecraft, but initially voiced her feminist sentiments through the mouths of fictional characters, knowing that if she spoke in her own voice her scandalous past would be held against her. But by the spring of 1799 she was ready to publish a polemical feminist treatise. In order to avoid having her ideas discredited by means of personal attacks on her past conduct, she published under a pseudonym, Anne Frances Randall (perhaps a memory of Ann Randall, the supposed prostitute imprisoned for shoplifting whose story may have caught her eye in the Morning Herald sixteen years before).
The book was called A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. It reproduces and develops many of the feminist sentiments that had been expressed in The False Friend. Mary attacks the law that gives a woman’s property to her husband when she marries; she exposes the double standard that exists in attitudes to everything from money to sex and to physical exercise. Whereas a man may protect his honour in a duel, women are supposed to guard their virtue and ‘possess an unsullied fame’, yet if they are wrongly slandered they have no recourse to defend their honour (Sir Sidney in Walsingham can only defend her good name because she is disguised as a man). A promiscuous man is positively admired for his virility, whereas once a woman has lost her reputation she is no longer received in polite society. It is arguable whether this was strictly true in Mary’s own case, given her ability to remain on amicable terms with her high-profile ex-lovers.
Women, Mary proposes, should be not ‘the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man’. ‘Constrained obedience,’ she writes, ‘is the poison of domestic joy.’ She argues directly from her own experience, asking her reader to think of a woman who has ‘experienced every insult, every injury, that her vain-boasting, high-bearing associate, man can inflict; imagine her, driven from society; deserted by her kindred; scoffed at by the world; exposed to poverty; assailed by malice; and consigned to scorn; she has no remedy’.14
The respect with which she and her works had been treated in France and Germany led her to pay particular attention to the iniquities of the treatment of women in her own country:
There is no country, at this epocha, on the habitable globe, which can produce so many exalted and illustrious women (I mean mentally) as England. And yet we see many of them living in obscurity; known only by their writings … we hear of no national honours, no public marks of popular applause, no rank, no title, no liberal and splendid recompense bestowed on British literary women! They must fly to foreign countries for celebrity, where talents are admitted to be of no SEX.15
The unjust exclusion of women from Parliament was another of her principal themes: given her close involvement with Fox and the 1784 election campaign, she was especially well placed to comment on this issue. She also marshalled her art of observation to question the idea that men are superior to women because they are physically stronger:
If woman be the weaker creature, why is she employed in laborious avocations? why compelled to endure the fatigue of household drudgery; to scrub, to scower, to labour, both late and early, while
the powdered lacquey only waits at the chair, or behind the carriage of his employer? Why are women, in many parts of the kingdom, permitted to follow the plough; to perform the laborious business of the dairy; to work in our manufactories; to wash, to brew, and to bake, while men are employed in measuring lace and ribands; folding gauzes; composing artificial bouquets; fancying feathers, and mixing cosmetics for the preservation of beauty? I have seen, and every inhabitant of the metropolis may, during the summer season, behold strong Welsh girls carrying on their heads strawberries, and other fruits from the vicinity of London to Covent-Garden market, in heavy loads which they repeat three, four, and five times, daily, for a very small pittance; while the male domesticks of our nobility are revelling in luxury, to which even their lords are strangers. Are women thus compelled to labour, because they are of the WEAKER SEX?16
She was especially concerned to answer the accusation that woman was mentally inferior to man, citing a long list of female intellectuals and public servants. She argued that men despise and fear intellectual women:
There are but three classes of women desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women; licentious women; and good sort of women. – The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love, by confessing inferiority; and a woman of real genius, eclipses him by her brilliancy.17
Her own advantage over other female intellectuals such as Wollstonecraft was that she was the epitome of a handsome woman and a licentious woman as well as a thinking woman of real genius.
The boldest practical proposal in the Letter to the Women of England was that a ‘UNIVERSITY FOR WOMEN’ should be established. ‘O my unenlightened country-women! read, and profit, by the admonition of Reason. Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you,’ wrote Mary, rousing herself to a pitch. ‘Let your daughters be liberally, classically, philosophically, and usefully educated; let them speak and write their opinions freely; let them read and think like rational creatures; adapt their studies to the strength of their intellect; expand their minds.’18 She also proposes the introduction of a meritocratic honours system in which women could be rewarded for their achievements with an ‘ORDER OF LITERARY MERIT’. This is consistent with the theme that runs throughout her later writings of the need for the aristocratic class system to be replaced with an ‘aristocracy of genius’.
At the end of the book, there is a ‘List of British Female Literary Characters Living in the Eighteenth Century’. Thirty-nine women are named, including feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, women of letters such as Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Miss Robinson – Novelist’, and, with more genres of writing to her credit than anyone else, ‘Mrs Robinson – Poems, Romances, Novels, a Tragedy, Satires, etc. etc.’.19
The Anti-Jacobin Review, which had rapidly become the most influential right-wing magazine of the day, with a circulation in excess of three thousand, condemned Anne Frances Randall as one of the ‘legion of Wollstonecrafts’.20 The Morning Post, meanwhile, printed passages concerning the subjugation of women from The False Friend, which was selling well (it was soon to be reprinted). There was also news that Mary was at work on a long blank verse poem in celebration of the early years of the French Revolution entitled – in the spirit of Godwin – ‘The Progress of Liberty’.
In the politically polarized Britain of the late 1790s, Mrs Robinson was regarded as a key literary figure. Fifteen years before, fictionalized ‘memoirs’ and ‘letters’ of Perdita had blackened her name. Now she was being damned as a Wollstonecraft by the Anti-Jacobin Review but praised in volumes with titles such as Literary Memoirs of Living Authors. Several of the more liberal monthly magazines printed biographical sketches that emphasized her respectability as an author, praising her monodies, the ‘satirical vigour’ of Modern Manners, her Sappho sonnets, and the progression of her novels away from sentimental and Gothic excess towards ‘the style of common life’, ‘in which she exhibited great power of imagination, knowledge of human nature, acuteness of research, and skill in the delineation of character; as well as a vein of humour, in describing scenes of a whimsical and ludicrous kind’.21
Mary had resumed her friendship with Godwin and was regularly entertaining him for tea and supper together with a range of other writers, mostly women. By June 1799 another novel was finished. It was published by Longman and Rees at the end of August with the title The Natural Daughter, with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. The Morning Post tried to create pre-publication interest by saying that ‘expectation was on tip-toe’ as to the identity of the real-life family on which the Leadenheads were based.22
In the twentieth century Tarleton’s biographer suggested that the title was an allusion to the illegitimacy of Banastre’s bride, Susan Bertie, but there is no contemporary evidence for this and no resemblance between her story and that of the illegitimate child in the book.23 The Natural Daughter is Mary’s most autobiographical novel, but it has very little to do with Tarleton.
It is written in the third person, not the epistolary first-person form that Mary habitually used. Though the novel was uniformly damned by the reviewers – disturbed by its Wollstonecraftian tendencies, they advised Mary to stick to poetry24 – there is a real maturity and confidence in the style. The story is set in the year 1792 when the French Revolution was ‘the great topic of conversation’. Unlike most women’s novels, which were courtship stories, here the heroine Martha Morley is married off early to a wealthy man. He abandons her and in order to survive financially she pursues a career as an actress, poet, and novelist. In this, Martha is Mary’s fictional double (in the Bible, the names Martha and Mary famously go together). The Natural Daughter predates by over fifty years Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, which literary historians usually describe as the first work in English by a woman writer in which the heroine is herself a professional author.25
The heroine sacrifices her reputation for the sake of an illegitimate child whom she befriends. The little girl Frances is conceived in a Paris prison (in real life Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny Imlay was also conceived in France during the turmoil of the early revolutionary years). Martha’s husband casts her off because he assumes the child is hers; at the end of the novel it is revealed that in fact the girl is his. Martha also has a sister Julia, who is her father’s favoured daughter – but who imprisons her mother in a madhouse, poisons her own illegitimate daughter, and finally commits suicide in the bed of Robespierre. Julia behaves like the sentimental heroine of conventional romance, but is ostentatious and deceitful; Martha, with her ‘face full of dimples’, is noisy and robust, ‘considered a mere masculine hoyden’, but the true heroine of the story. Wrongly accused and spurned by her husband, she is a spirited independent woman in the Wollstonecraft mould. The title thus has a double meaning: little Frances is the ‘natural daughter’ in the sense of an illegitimate child, but Martha is the ‘natural daughter’ in the sense that she is rational and generous, in contrast to her financially favoured but morally unnatural sister.
Robinson is bold in her deployment of real historical figures. The revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat makes an appearance: he tries to seduce a tragic actress called Mrs Sedgley who is imagined as a ‘juvenile Siddons’. Martha is a ‘natural actress’ who combines the ‘easy elegance of a Farren’ with the ‘genuine playful graces of the queen of smiles – the attractive Jordan’.26 Her experience of the acting profession reflects Mary’s own: she at once becomes a figure of glamour and a woman regarded with suspicion in respectable society.
The Leadenhead family of the novel’s subtitle are comic grotesques. They have made their fortunes from slavery, but want their son to win military honours. Rich and vulgar, they long for a title. Julia marries the son, but they soon separate. There may be a dig at the Tarleton family in all this.
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p; Martha, meanwhile, is dismissed by her theatrical manager and turns to literature in order to support herself. She writes for ‘fame and profit’, and because there are so few opportunities for poor unprotected women. This sequence almost certainly reveals something of Mary’s own novel-writing techniques: Martha sits down to plan what kind of novel would appeal in the light of contemporary fashion. When she has finished, ‘The story was melancholy, the portraits drawn from living characters, and the title both interesting and attractive.’ She finds it very difficult to get a publisher, but finally gets a deal with the dashing Mr Index. At this point there is some excellent satire on the publishing world, especially in the character of Index. ‘We have our warehouses full of unsold sentimental novels already,’ he says, ‘they only sell for waste paper.’ He encourages Martha to write a scandalous work instead: ‘If your fertile pen can make a story out of some recent popular event … or anything from real life of equal celebrity or notoriety, your fortune is made; your works will sell, and you will either be admired or feared by the whole phalanx of fashionable readers.’ Index also makes it clear that the author has to play a part in the promotion of a book: ‘You should write a Dedication, full of fine words and laboured panegyric.’27
Mary was adept at shifting gear from satire to strong feeling. In one very moving passage, she reveals her own sense of isolation from the busy world. Martha looks out of the window of her west end apartment and contemplates life:
From her window she observed the passing throngs, like the gaudy ephemera of a summer noon; the glittering atoms, which dazzle for an hour, and then shrink into nothing. There did she contemplate, with a philosophic smile, the motley idols of capricious fortune: the light gossomary visions of a day, borne on the gale and towering in the warm regions of a prosperous destiny; or shrinking from the cutting blasts of poverty, and creeping to oblivion.28
