Perdita : the life of Mary Robinson / Paula Byrne.

London : HarperCollins, 2004.

xvi, 477 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), portraits (some color) ; 25 cm

"To Coleridge she was 'a woman of undoubted genius', to others she was simply 'the most interesting woman of her age'. She was in her time the darling of the London stage, mistress to the most powerful men in England, a renowned feminist thinker, and a best-selling author more famous for her poetry than Wordsworth." "But though she was one of the most flamboyant women of the late-eighteenth century, Mary Robinson's life was also scarred by reversals of fortune. After being abandoned by her merchant father, who left England to establish a fishery among the Canadian Esquimo, Mary was married, at age fifteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipated lifestyle landed the couple and their baby in debtors' prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry and met lifelong friend Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire." "On her release, Mary quickly became one of the most popular actresses of the day, famously playing Perdita in The Winter's Tale for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. She later used his copious love letters for blackmail. After being paralyzed, apparently following a miscarriage, she remade herself as a writer." "In this biography Paula Byrne describes a woman whose beginnings were the stuff of eighteenth-century urbanity, and whose latter life was the very type of Romantic myth-making: she wrote opium-fuelled poetry as Coleridge did, she expounded on the rights of women, and Godwin fell heavily for her charms. Her story, epitomises the metamorphosis between two of the most influential sensibilities in British life, thought and literature"--Jacket.

Life of Mary Robinson

Online version: Byrne, Paula. Perdita. London : HarperCollins, 2004

English

March 14, 2005

Includes bibliographical references (pages 431-462) and index.

Biographies.

England London.