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…
“O my unenlightened country-women! read, and profit by the admonition of Reason. Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles which debase you.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Irony, Despair
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…
“I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother’s wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you, and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people’s real characters and never expecting them to act out of it.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Longing
