SOURCE: Hoagwood, Terence Allan and Rebecca Jackson. Introduction to Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, by Mary Robinson, pp. 3-11. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1995.

In the following essay Hoagwood and Jackson examine the ten sonnets that comprise Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets for their textual history and for their anti-Romantic critique of idealized sexual love.

The present volume reprints the first edition of Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796),¹ and then two sets of material from the posthumous Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson (3 vols., 1806): the anonymous biographical essay prefixed to the first volume of that work, and ten of the nineteen sonnets that follow Sappho and Phaon in its reprinted form in the third volume of that collection.² Outside the framing fiction of the story of Sappho, the ten...