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Published posthumously in 1801, the Memoirs of Mary Robinson constitute a kind of retrospective exhibition designed to promote a re-evaluation of her character and an appreciative assessment of her acting and writing career. Although the work was initially issued in four volumes, including "some posthumous pieces" and poems of tribute to Robinson, the autobiographical narrative of the original Volumes 1 and 2 is all that survives in many subsequent editions.1 Owing largely to a general historical interest in the life of a woman who was once a dazzling actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV), Robinson's autobiography, unlike her poems and novels, has never really vanished from the popular domain.2 Only in recent years, however, has it become the object of significant literary interest and a crucial text for feminist considerations of larger questions such as "Who gets to write the story of female sexuality?" and "How does a woman become a poet?"
In posing these questions, Anne Mellor and Linda Peterson are both concerned with issues of narrative authority and their broader cultural implications. Surveying a wide range of portraits and cartoons as well as verbal texts, Mellor situates Robinson's autobiography within a narrative contest over who gets to tell her story, according to what paradigm (i.e., "whore," "'unprotected' and abused wife," "star-crossed lover," "successful artist").3 More specifically concerned with the last of these paradigms, Peterson emphasizes Robinson's "ambivalences" toward "Romantic mythologies of the male artist, with their emphasis on natural genius and superior literary taste." Robinson's autobiography is "a historically pivotal and generically significant text," Peterson argues, precisely because it is "one of the first attempts to combine (masculine) myths of the Romantic artist with (feminine) versions of becoming a poet."4
To appreciate fully the conflicted ground of Robinson's selfauthorization in the Memoirs, however, we need to look beyond the self that she constructs in the autobiographical narrative of Volumes 1 and 2 to the invisible and protean persona that she adopts in The Sylphid, a group of fourteen editorials collected in Volume 3. According to the introductory note in Volume 3, Robinson had "prepared and arranged the whole for separate publication previous to her last illness."5 The publication of The Sylphid with the autobiography, then, may well have...