SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re)Presentations of the Self.” English Studies in Canada 21, no. 4 (December 1995): 407-24.

In the following essay, Ty looks at Mary Robinsion's Memoirs, her treatise Thoughts on the Condition of Women and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, and her novel The False Friend for the ways these works depict different aspects of Robinson's self-construction, and considers how the narratives of these works present shifting representations of Robinson's female identity.

What a creature is woman! How wildly inconsistent! How daring, yet how timid! We are at once the most ambitious tyrants, and the most abject slaves. … We boast a resisting power formed on the basis of stern and frigid virtue; we are philosophers in precept,—but how often are we women in example!

(Robinson, The False Friend 2: 92-94)

Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800), actress, poet, novelist, playwright, and autobiographer, published at...