Mary Ann Lamb was born on 3 December 1764 in London, into a family whose modest respectability, intellectual curiosity, and later misfortunes would shape her entire life. She died on 20 May 1847, having survived nearly a decade beyond her beloved younger brother and lifelong collaborator, Charles Lamb. To many generations she was known principally as “Charles Lamb’s sister,” the anonymous or partially hidden partner…
“You would like to see us, as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Longing
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…
“The barbarity of custom’s law in this enlightened country has long been exercised to the prejudice of woman: and even the laws of honour have been perverted to oppress her.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
