SOURCE: Hodson, Jane. “‘The Strongest but Most Undecorated Language’: Mary Robinson's Rhetorical Strategy in Letter to the Women of England.” Women's Writing 9, no. 1 (2002): pp. 87-105.

In the following essay, Hodson considers Robinson's use of specific linquistic elements to identify purpose and audience in her piece on women's rights entitled Letter to the Women of England.

Judith Pascoe has described Mary Robinson as a “cultural chameleon” who adopted “every literary fashion” during the 1790s.¹ In this article, I shall explore what was perhaps Robinson's most remarkable change of literary colour, her 1799 proto-feminist tract, Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Early on in this text, Robinson states her rhetorical strategy in the following terms:

In order that this letter may be clearly understood, I shall proceed to prove my assertion in the strongest, but most undecorated language. I shall remind my enlightened country-women that...