In his introduction to A. Mary F. Robinson's poems in The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (1907) Arthur Symons, critic and poet of the Decadent movement, described the writer as the "spoilt child of literature--of two literatures." While this comment might seem an inappropriate remark to include in an otherwise laudatory essay, it was accurate. Robinson was born into a wealthy family and spent her youth in London, immersed in the society of the famous Pre-Raphaelites of the 1880s. Her parents financed the publication of her first book of verse when she was only twenty-one years old, and she then spent the next few years traveling across Europe. Most of Robinson's adult life was spent in France, where she opened her home to the Parisian literary world of the early twentieth century. While most of her nineteenth-century writing was done in English, she spent the last...