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
Joanna Baillie was born on 11 September 1762 at the manse of Bothwell, near Hamilton in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and died on 23 February 1851 at Hampstead, then a village on the northern edge of London. During her exceptionally long life, she became one of the most admired British writers of the Romantic period: a poet of acute observation, an ambitious theorist of the emotions, a dramatist who sought to renew tragedy…
“I have to thank it, for that kind of reception which is best calculated to make a work go on well—praise mixed with a considerable portion of censure.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Longing
