SOURCE: Luther, Susan. “A Stranger Minstrel: Coleridge's Mrs. Robinson.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 3 (fall 1994): 391-409.

In the following essay, Luther explores the nature of Coleridge's feelings as both a father-protector and a critic to the older, more established Mary Robinson, as evidenced in their literary exchanges.

In the late eighteenth century, as Jane Spencer points out, both sexes tended “to see women writers as heroines”—and “making a woman writer a heroine linked her life and her writing together, so that the one was judged in terms of the other.”¹ Many of Mary Darby Robinson's popular novels and poems invite such a conflation of the woman with her words. Implicitly or explicitly, they play upon her reputation as a beauty as well as her notoriety for having once been “Perdita” to the Prince of Wales's “Florizel” and thereafter companion to war hero Banastre Tarleton, in whose ungrateful service...