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The decision of a notorious woman like Mary Robinson to publish in what was also a notorious genre, the Gothic, is on the face of it a curious career move, but one that twentieth-century scholars have not chosen to pursue.1 Her writing in the Gothic during the 1790s only drew further attention to Robinson's well-known sexual indiscretions, radical political sympathies, and questionable behaviors.2 Why would Robinson jeopardize her considerable reputation as a poet by intentionally situating herself as the author of Gothic novels? Why risk participating in what one reviewer called 'the terrorist system of novel-writing'?3 Unlike Ann Radcliffe, a woman with a stable marriage and quiet lifestyle, Robinson was caught in the double bind of being a woman with a questionable reputation writing in a genre which, beyond the works of Radcliffe, was perceived of as morally ambiguous. Robinson was a successful lyric poet before she published her first volume of (Gothic) fiction in 1792; but she nonetheless dedicated a substantial portion of her career to the composition of a type of literature that was often hotly debated and critically scorned. Anna Aikin (later Barbauld), for example, remarks in 1773 that 'the greediness with which the tales of ghosts and goblins, or murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all the most terrible disasters attending human life, are devoured by every ear, must have been generally remarked'.4 The public's voracious appetite for the violence and drama of Gothic fiction was widely acknowledged and the subject of fervent debate. At first, this notoriety, and its consequent potential for commercial reward, were likely powerful practical incentives for Robinson, who struggled to support herself with income generated by her writing and sporadic support from the royal family.5 Vancenza: or, the Dangers of Credulity (1792), an immediate success that sold through multiple editions in a month, was followed by Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796), The False Friend, a Domestic Story (1799) and The Natural Daughter, with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family (1799). Yet her investment in Gothic romance clearly transcended the immediate economic imperatives, since Robinson insisted on writing Gothic fiction as her reviews gradually worsened, profits dwindled, and her health declined. This essay examines Robinson's dedication to the genre and her decision to frame...