SOURCE: Peterson, Linda H. “Becoming an Author: Mary Robinson's Memoirs and the Origins of Woman Artist's Autobiography.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 36-50. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Peterson asserts that Robinson's Memoirs was an attempt “to present herself as an authentic Romantic artist,” an attempt that was largely rejected by the reading public. According to Peterson, the work was also a deathbed effort to provide financial support for her daughter, who finished the work and published it after her mother's death.

How does a woman become an author? Romantic mythologies of the male artist, with their emphasis on natural genius and superior literary taste, posit an organic development deriving from innate capacity; recent books by literary historians have, in contrast, stressed more practical nineteenth-century efforts to make authorship a legitimate profession, one...