Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

Mary Robinson and the Gothic

Mary Robinson and the Gothic
  • Jerrold E. Hogle
  • Published online:
    29 March 2023
    Print publication:
    27 April 2023
  • Celebrated as an actress on the London stage (1776–80) and notorious as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (1779–80), Mary Darby Robinson had to write to support herself from the mid–1780s until her death in 1800. She mastered a wide range of styles, published prolifically, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post. As her writing developed across the 1790s, she increasingly used the motifs of Gothic fiction and drama descended from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). These came to pervade her late novels and poems so much that she even wrote her autobiography as a Gothic romance. She also deployed them to critique the ideologies of male dominance and the forms of writing in which they appeared. This progression culminated in her final collection of verses, Lyrical Tales (1800), where she Gothically exposes the conflicted underpinnings in the now-famous Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.