SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “Making an Exhibition of Her Self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts of Female Sexuality.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22, no. 3 (2000): 271-304.

In the following essay, Mellor considers the construction of nineteenth-century female sexuality by looking at the various ways Mary Robinson's life-story was told, and the alternate characterizations of her as a whore, an unprotected wife, a star-crossed lover, and a talented, successful artist.

Who—or what—was Mary Robinson? What can we learn from an exploration of the life and writings of this almost forgotten female author of the English Romantic period? I turn our attention to Mary Robinson because she poses what I think is a fascinating problem, both about our current intellectual constructions of subjectivity and about the ways in which women—and in particular female sexuality—were understood in Europe between 1780 and 1830. The career of Mary Robinson forces us to confront the...