SOURCE: Curran, Stuart. “Mary Robinson and the New Lyric.” Women's Writing 9, no. 1 (2002): 9-22.

In the following essay, Curran asserts that Robinson's greatest legacy is her innovative use of metrical and sonic effects to create a contemporary sound and style.

This article takes its point of departure from Judith Pascoe's contemplation of Mary Robinson's elaborate and continual self-presentation in Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship.¹ Denied her career as an actress after becoming the Prince of Wales's mistress, she simply moved to a more encompassing stage, turning the streets of London's West End and the carriageways of Hyde Park into a daily production number for the progress of her equipage. Once she was reduced from such opportunities for opulent display, moreover, Robinson, the flâneuse who once stopped traffic, reinvented herself as “the English Sappho”, distinguishing herself as a poet who paid extraordinary and, in terms of eighteenth-century norms...