Charlotte Richardson, born on 5 March 1775 and dead on 26 September 1825, belongs to that large, increasingly important company of British women poets whose names survived in catalogues more securely than they survived in literary histories. Her career unfolded during a period when poetry was widely read, widely written, and yet unevenly preserved. The great names of Romanticism came to dominate later accounts of the…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Charlotte Richardson
Poet B
Mary Robinson
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 71%
Poems 80%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Mary Robinson, born Mary Darby on 27 November 1757 and dead on 26 December 1800, was one of the most conspicuous and variously gifted women of late Georgian Britain. In her forty-three years she became, successively and often simultaneously, a schoolgirl poet, an unhappy wife, a debtor’s-prison inmate, a successful London actress, the notorious mistress of the Prince of Wales, a fashion celebrity, a political comment…
“I cannot conclude these opinions without paying tribute to the talents of my illustrious country-women; who, unpatronized by the courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble themselves by the unperishable lustre of mental pre-eminence.”
In time
Charlotte Richardson
Mary Robinson
1757
1825
They overlapped for 26 years (1775–1800).
When Charlotte Richardson was born, Mary Robinson was about 18.
Charlotte Richardson was about 25 when Mary Robinson died.
On the map
About 191 km separate Hickling, Nottinghamshire, England from Bristol, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Charlotte Richardson
Mary Robinson
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
Charlotte Richardson only
From the biographies
women
woman
Charlotte Richardson: late georgian england, charlotte smith, poems on various subjects, devotional poetry, domestic sphere, moral reflection, religious feeling, elegy. Mary Robinson: bristol, london, perdita, george prince of wales, thomas robinson, debtors' prison, hannah more, vancenza; or, the dangers of credulity.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Charlotte Richardson
1805
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Charlotte Richardson: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality. Mary Robinson: Sorrow, Irony, Despair.