The Works of Mary Robinson, Part I

Part I Volumes 1 and 2 Editor: Daniel Robinson Poems Robinson's contemporaries dubbed her 'the English Sappho'. An ardent admirer of her poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared her 'a woman of undoubted Genius', and he praised the meter of her poem 'The Haunted Beach' in a letter to his fellow poet Robert Southey: 'ay! that Woman has an Ear'. A prolific poet, she wrote Della Cruscan verse under a variety of pseudonyms, political and satirical poems, a long sonnet sequence entitled Sappho and Phaon (1796), and a volume entitled Lyrical Tales (1800) that reflects the influence of Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798). Robinson often reprinted her poems, which appeared in variant forms in newspapers, her novels, and in volumes of poetry. This collection will be the first complete and scholarly edition of Robinson's poetry ever published and will include periodical verse that did not appear in the posthumous 1806 Poetical Works. Editor: Dawn Vernooy-Epp Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity (1792) Set in fifteenth-century Spain, Vancenza is both a cautionary tale about the dangers of female credulity and a Gothic romance. The protagonist, Elvira, is a beautiful and naive orphan of unknown parentage who uses her veil to bandage a wounded Prince. The Prince falls in love with her, and, after a series of misadventures, they become engaged. Before the wedding, however, she discovers a manuscript that reveals that she is the Prince's half-sister. Horrified by the prospect of marrying her own brother, she expires. Written when the Gothic craze was at its height, Vancenza went into five editions by 1794. Robinson revisited the theme of incest in her penultimate novel, The False Friend. The Widow, or a Picture of Modern Times (1794) Robinson's second novel, The Widow, is heavily influenced by Frances Burney's Evelina. Like its predecessor, it is an epistolary social satire, and the sadistic treatment of simple country people by the idle landed gentry in Th