SOURCE: Curran, Stuart. “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 17-35. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Curran considers Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales for its contemporary significance. Curran looks at her publisher's placement of Robinson alongside Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth as the preeminent poets of the time, and examines the dynamics between these four poets.

Joseph Cottle concludes the first volume of his Early Recollections with the departure of Wordsworth and Coleridge for the continent following his publication of the first volume of their Lyrical Ballads, an event by which he marked his own retirement from an uncertain vocation:

I for ever quitted the business of a bookseller, with the earnest hope that the time might never arrive when Bristol possessed not a bookseller, prompt to extend a friendly hand...