SOURCE: Miskolcze, Robin L. “Snapshots of Contradiction in Mary Robinson's Poetical Works.” Papers on Language and Literature 31, no. 2 (spring 1995): 206-19.

In the following essay, Miskolcze reexamines women writers' place in the early Romantic movement by considering Mary Robinson's poetry, wherein her use of exiles and fugitives can be read as embodiments of the contradictions within the movement itself.

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars engaged with British Romanticism generally have been eager to contain the period within the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and, in the process, maintain the revered status accorded the traditional “Big Six”—Blake; William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats. With the rediscovery of works by many women of the age, however, delimiting the period has become more difficult as Romanticism's long-accepted definitions are not only now being called into question, but the inclusion of women writers whose works are still in the...