Mary Robinson

27 November 1757 – 26 December 1800 (~43)

2 live poems · English

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.”

Mary Lamb

3 December 1764 – 20 May 1847 (~83)

3 live poems · English

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.”