The Works of Mary Robinson, Part II

Part II Volume 5 Editor: William D Brewer Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature: A Domestic Story (1797) For the first three volumes of Walsingham, Sir Sidney Aubrey appears to be the title-character's male rival, 'the seducer' of the woman he loves, but near the end of the fourth and final volume the protagonist abruptly learns that Sir Sidney is a woman. Although Sidney's position as a rich male baronet gives her freedoms denied late eighteenth-century women, her closeted sexual identity becomes a burden that nearly destroys her. The novel suggests that gender is performative and, through its portrait of an emotionally volatile 'pupil of nature' who (unwittingly) fights a duel with one woman and seduces and ultimately destroys another, critiques the eighteenth-century valorization of the man of feeling. Volume 6 Editor: Julie A Shaffer The False Friend: A Domestic Story (1799) In The False Friend Robinson explores two themes that recur throughout her writings: incest and illegitimacy. The novel focuses on the quest of the orphaned Gertrude St. Leger to discover her parentage and form an identity in a corrupt society swarming with manipulative, treacherous, and predatory men (false friends). Her mysterious and mercurial guardian, Lord Denmore, fails to tell his ward that she is his daughter, the product of an adulterous love affair, and she becomes infatuated with him, not realizing that her passion for him is incestuous. Gertrude's loss of her maternal genealogy, symbolized by the erasure of her dead mother's portrait and her accidental fragmentation of Sappho's bust (for which her mother was the model), stunts her emotional and social development. The mistakes of her parents doom the innocent and chronically depressed heroine of this darkly pessimistic novel. Volume 7 Editor: Hester Davenport The Natural Daughter. With Portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel (1799) Set in England and revolutionary France, The Natural Daughter invites comparisons between male