Few women's lives have described such an arc as that of Mary Robinson - or Perdita, as she was widely known. She began her career as an actress, royal mistress and possible blackmailer, and ended it just two decades later as a Romantic poet and early feminist thinker of note. She was the subject of paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds, and of a hundred political cartoons. Variously portrayed as a wounded innocent and a harlot, she deliberately chose, in her later career, to make a political issue of her sexuality. Born in 1758 in the shadow of Bristol cathedral, she married at fifteen - one Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk of seemingly good family. But Mary had barely made her curtsey to society before discovering that Robinson was little better than a conman. As things grew worse, she followed her husband into debtors' prison, where she wrote her first book of poems. Encouraged by Sheridan and Garrick, who admired her beauty, she went on the stage, and over the next four years app
Cărți,multe cărți.
