“There is no country, at this epoch, on this habitable globe, which can produce so many exalted and illustrious women… as England.”

 

During her lifetime Mary Robinson (1757-1800) was a famous actress, dramatist, poet, novelist and familiar figure in the pages of the London press… not least for becoming an infamous royal mistress. Robinson also campaigned for women to be taken seriously as writers and thinkers.

In 1800, she set her sights on the most influential work of the first major text of British Romanticism, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). In her own response, Lyrical Tales, Robinson blends the Gothic, Comic and Sentimental to produce a volume which she playfully positions as doing what Wordsworth aspired to do but didn’t quite pull off, to celebrate the folk tales and poetic style of the rural labouring classes.

The result is a thrilling tour through ghost stories, bawdy comic tales and captivating descriptions of rural life. Part satire and part homage, Robinson’s collection also made the case for a new kind of Romanticism, one written by Romantic women writers with just as much genius as their male counterparts.