ABSTRACT
Shortly before her death on 26 December 1800, Mary Robinson enjoined her daughter, Maria Elizabeth, to publish the autobiographical narrative that became the centerpiece of https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:xs="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson. Written by Herself (1801). 1 In her prefatory “Advertisement,” Maria Elizabeth, explains that she is publishing the work to honor “the solemn injunction of a dying parent, and the promise pledged by a child in circumstances so aweful [sic] and affecting.” Maria Elizabeth adds that it is “impossible” for her to “feel indifferent to the vindication of a being so beloved, and ever so lamented, whose real character was little known, and who, in various instances, was the victim of calumny and misrepresentation” (1: ii). With the word vindication, Maria Elizabeth foregrounds a motive for writing that does not rise to the surface of her mother’s text until she interrupts the narrative of her life, after almost 80 pages, to assert, “Indeed the world has mistaken the character of my mind; I have ever been the reverse of volatile and dissipated; I mean not to write my own eulogy; though, with the candid and sensitive mind, I shall I trust succeed in my vindication” (1: 78–9). The charges of volatility and dissipation brought against Robinson date back to the spring of 1780, when she resigned her position as an actress at Drury Lane and assumed a prominent role in the theatre of London scandal as mistress of the 17-year-old Prince of Wales (later George IV). The Prince, by the own admission, had fallen “over head & ears in love” with Robinson on the fateful evening of 3 December 1779, when she played the role of Perdita in a command performance of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane. 2 Although their liaison lasted only about a year, Robinson, N.E. Portion of the Cloister of the Minster from <italic>Skelton’s Etchings of the Antiquities of Bristol</italic> (1825) is reproduced courtesy of Lilly Library, Duke University. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315606903/846101ad-c8da-46d3-a421-0350e9204471/content/fig2.jpg"/> 33to this day, remains fixed in the popular imagination as “Perdita,” the “lost one,” “the Prince’s Mistress.”
