Bulletin of The John Rylands Library Volume 90 Issue 2 2014 (Doi 10.7227/bjrl.90.2.6) Cross, Ashley - Writing Pain - Sensibility and Suffering in The Late Letters of Anna Seward and Mary Robinson

Writing Pain:
Sensibility and Suffering in the Late Letters of Anna

Seward and Mary Robinson
ASHLEY CROSS
Abstract
‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward’s Letters (1811) and Mary Robinson’s
letters (1800) create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith’s sonnets made
feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it.
However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body
of sensibility on which Seward’s and Robinson’s early poetic reputations had
depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith’s model
made it an important model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth
century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and
Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with
disabled bodies, Smith’s example needed to be reimagined to account for the
reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain.
Keywords: Charlotte Smith; Mary Robinson; Anna Seward; sensibility; women
writers; disability studies; illness; Della Cruscan; Romantic correspondence;
pain; suffering
‘Of what species is she?’

‘Human,’ was the laconic answer.
‘I mean, of what character?’
‘Her distress is the best voucher for her reputation,’ replied the person addressed.
(Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter, 1799)1
Though both were highly popular writers in the last two decades of the eight-
eenth century and equally visible in the press, Lichfield local and enthusiast,
Anna Seward (1742–1809), would probably not have wanted to be associated
with London actress and courtesan, Mary Robinson (1758?–1800). Dubbed the
‘Swan of Lichfield’, Seward aligned herself with an English tradition of poetic
swans that included male writers from Homer (Swan of Meander) to Pope
(Swan of Twickenham).2 A bluestocking intellectual, she saw herself as part of
a literary elite and a protector of tradition. Despite never marrying, she enjoyed
economic security her entire life – unlike Robinson, who was married before the
age of 18, dictated London fashion for a decade, lived scandalously, and died in
near poverty. Few female authors could be more different in their contemporary
reputations. Though Robinson later created herself as a poet on the model of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, she never escaped her identification with Perdita
in The Winter’s Tale, the role that earned her the Prince of Wales’s attentions
and her reputation as his mistress. Her publicized affairs, liberal politics and
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 90, No. 2 (Autumn 2014), pp. 85–110, published by Manchester University Press.
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.90.2.6
Delivered by Ingenta to: UCL LIBRARY

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86 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
exploitation of her sexual history in her writings did little to lessen this reputa-
tion, much as she struggled in other ways to overcome her image as a member
of the demi-monde.
If Seward’s writing grew from her sense of entitlement and place, Robinson’s
developed from her economic needs and a desire for literary authority. Given
such appearances, few critics have addressed the connection between these two
women’s writing careers in spite of intriguing, even striking, parallels.3 Both led
unconventional female lives: personally, with married men, and poetically, in their
challenges to dominant literary conventions, especially those of form and gender.
Seward created a unique genre, the poetical novel, with her publication of Louisa in
1784; Robinson reinvented the lyrical ballad with her publication of Lyrical Tales
in 1800. Both writers claimed Shakespeare, Milton and Pope as their forefathers
and sought to write themselves into a male English literary tradition, especially
through the ‘legitimate Petrarchan sonnet’. They imagined their emotional sensi-
tivity and intellect as sources of literary authority that were specifically feminine,
but also strove to be Wollstonecraftian masculine women, capable of arguing their
literary values in the public sphere of the newspapers. They shared another experi-
ence at the end of their careers that affected their writing and the urgency of their
self-promotion, the focus of this essay: failing bodies.
Beyond indicating a set of shared experiences, their similar career trajectories
can also tell us about the changing status of the female body in the history of sensi-
bility; the normal female body registered its compassion in physical signs like tears
and sighs; but the abnormal body exhibited its sensibility in bodily failure, debility
and sickness. From its first articulations in the early eighteenth century in the Earl
of Shaftesbury’s philosophy and Anne Finch’s poetry, the discourse of sensibility
produced, and was produced by, debates over its terms, practices and cultural
meanings, which had profound implications for women that centred on the recep-
tivity of female bodies. If initially it seemed to offer moral authority grounded in
women’s greater sensitivity, by the time Henry Mackenzie published The Man
of Feeling (1771), the discourse had become ever more contradictory and unsta-
ble; increasingly sites of contention, figures of sensibility could represent sincere
compassion or emotional exhibitionism, or both at the same time. Seward’s and
Robinson’s writing lives embody these discursive shifts and their effect on women
poets whose literary fame came from their public displays of sensibility. In the
early stages of their careers (1780s and early 1790s), their mutual interests in per-
formative poetic modes and in sympathetic identification materialized in highly
praised poems of feeling. Seward’s first poetic recognition occurred in 1778 when
she won first prize for her poem ‘Invocation to the Comic Muse’ at Lady Miller’s
salon in Batheaston. There followed the immensely popular, nationalist elegies
on Captain Cook (1780) and Major André (1781). Though Robinson published
two poetry volumes (1775 and 1777) and operatic songs (1778) before the 1780s,
it was her public appearance as Laura in The World (1788), in the eroto-poetic
dialogues with Della Crusca (Robert Merry) and Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley)
that fuelled her literary reputation and led to her highly praised Poems (1791). In

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LETTERS OF ANNA SEWARD AND MARY ROBINSON 87
each case, however, the emotional excess of their styles became tied to their public
conduct and was used to devalue their writing. When Louisa; a Poetical Novel
(1784) appeared, for example, the European Magazine (August 1784) attacked
Seward for ‘misleading others through the fairy-land of wild, erroneous sensibility,
sentiment, and affection’. Emphasizing the parallel between poem and mind, the
review stressed how the poet’s ‘elegant but sentimentally wild genius’ had created
a poem whose ‘rapturous lines’ bordered on ‘obscenity’ – shocking from the pen of
such ‘a young poetess who is on the side of virtue’.4
If Seward’s poem revealed its writer’s sexual proclivities as reviewers suggested,
by contrast, Robinson’s sexual history shaped the public understanding of her poetic
sensibility; that did not even have to be mentioned explicitly. For instance, a critic
of Robinson’s Poems (1793) notes that ‘true taste turns with disdain and disgust
from all meretricious ornaments. We think that Mrs. Robinson is sometimes in
danger of being misled by the glare of what some may think splendor.’5 The implied
reference, here, to Della Cruscan tinsel (‘glare’) – which I return to below – appears
as an indictment of style, but the word ‘meretricious’ subtly recalls Robinson’s
biography; she had already been ‘misled’ into being the Prince of Wales’s courtesan.
In both these cases, the very sensibility that had made their poetic reputations early
on threatened to undermine their authorship later in their careers.
When they began constructing their literary reputations for posterity, Seward
and Robinson were anxious to establish their credentials, especially in light of
such critical attempts to invalidate them as serious authors on the grounds of their
theatrical poetic style and unfeminine behaviour. At the ends of their careers,
these British Sapphos, as they were called, saw themselves as literary authori-
ties with the ability to shape literary history.6 They engaged in public debate as
literary and social critics, Seward in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Robinson in The
Morning Post, The Monthly Magazine, and Letter to the Women of England on the
Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799).7 Intent on solidifying their authorial
reputations, they hoped to manage their posthumous identities by compiling their
poetic works and crafting final books to present their writing lives: Seward negoti-
ated with Arthur Constable for the publication of her volumes of letters and with
Walter Scott about her poetic corpus; Robinson wrote her Memoirs and gathered
her poems for a volume of complete Poetical Works. However, their gestures of
self-authorization were complicated by physical debility: Seward suffered from
lameness as a result of a knee injury to her patella in 1768, a continued experience
of headaches and vertigo, and, from 1807, suffered a disorder caused by scurvy;
Robinson struggled with progressive paralysis as a result of an accident in 1783 – a
possible miscarriage that led to streptococcal infection and rheumatic fever – that
required her to be carried wherever she went. Each experienced bodily pain that
threatened to impede their writing even as it spurred them to produce more. At
the ends of their lives, corporal pain intensified their pursuits of posthumous
reputation and increasingly shaped how they wrote and thought. Issues of writing
became quite literally about their disabled bodies.8
For poets like Seward and Robinson, invested in the classical literary tradition,

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the model of the productive disabled poet would have been someone whose work
they both loved and whose un-self-pitying industriousness, despite multiple spinal,
respiratory and cardiac illnesses, denied his body’s visible limitations: Alexander
Pope.9 However, both women’s early poetry had invested them in a feminine sen-
sibility, which ran counter to Pope’s ideal – moderate, rational man. In addition, as
excesses of sensibility were increasingly read as sickness and disease, that discourse
became a dominant lens through which bodily debility was interpreted. In this polit-
icized context, the most important text published between Seward’s and Robinson’s
early renown and their concern with posthumous fame was their contemporary
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784), published the same year as Seward’s
Louisa. The sonnets established Smith’s reputation, and the immense success of her
novels Romance of Real Life (1787) and Emmeline (1788) clinched it. Moreover, by
the time they published their own sonnet collections (Robinson in 1796 and Seward
in 1799) to stake their claims, Elegiac Sonnets had already gone into seven editions,
including a subscription edition in 1789 that garnered a huge 810 signatures.10
For women poets, Smith had conquered the literary market by promulgating
a new model of sensibility that made suffering the source of feminine agency,
morality and poetic genius. Though later in life Smith also struggled with disabil-
ity, the sonnets’ youthful persona offered a compelling identity for women poets
because she controlled her powerful emotions by displacing them onto nature and
obscured the actual source of the speaker’s anguish (whether social oppressions or
her physical body).11 Her suffering was intellectual, aestheticized and seemingly
private; the lack of corroborating other – except for the reader – made the poems
appear to be unaffected. Rejecting the Petrarchan sonnet’s octet/sestet form, with
its dependence on only four rhymes, and its erotic content, Smith also offered a
new form of the genre, deemed illegitimate because of its formal variation and
reliance on the closing couplet to convey the suffering of its lyric subject. Smith’s
illegitimate sonnets were read as tasteful, a sincere expression of her sensibility
and not performance. As multiple poems to Smith attested, they presented her
‘real woe’, her suffering signified on her body (‘Dejection on her Brow was seated
high; / Wan care her lovely Cheeks had ravg’d foul, / And bitter Anguish beam’d
within her Eye’), but tastefully and sympathetically; she ‘for happier born, and
bred to better times, / To be reduc’d to supplicating rhymes: / Hard was thy lot,
with such a sense refin’d, /To an unworthy consort to be join’d’.12 The reviewers
agreed: ‘trifling compliment is paid Mrs. Smith, when it is observed how much
her Sonnets exceed those of Shakespeare and Milton’, The Gentleman’s Magazine
claimed in 1786; and John Thelwall, in The Universal Magazine, exclaimed that
Smith’s sonnets ‘display a more touching melancholy, a more poetical simplicity,
nay I will venture to say, a greater vigour and correctness of genius, than any
other English poems that I have ever seen, and I certainly do not mean to except
the sonnets of Milton’.13 Even Smith’s biggest competitor – and perhaps biggest
imitator – for sonnet fame, William Lisle Bowles, emphasized his sonnets’ ‘great
Inferiority to [Smith’s] beautiful and elegant Compositions’, when he published
the second edition of his Fourteen Sonnets.

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Though equally extreme, intense emotion worked in favour of Smith, but

against Seward and Robinson, whose poetry was viewed as theatrical artifice and
thus morally suspect. Their poetic sensibilities consequently invalidated their real
suffering. Aware of the rhetorical and ideological power of Smith’s example in a
culture whose literary values and sexual mores were becoming more conservative,
they also recognized its inadequacy to their literary careers. Smith’s melancholy
style turned mental stress into a source of poetic authority, creating a productive
relationship between writing and pain; but it also effaced the physical body that
had been central to eighteenth-century understandings of feminine sensibility.14
Seward’s and Robinson’s non-normative lives, their effusive and theatrical poetic
styles, and their disabled bodies meant that Smith’s model of poetic identity in
Elegiac Sonnets could not provide them with lasting reputations in a masculine
literary tradition. If they experienced a similar imbrication of pain and poetry
as Smith’s speaker(s), their distress was profoundly corporeal; its effects on their
writing taught them the reciprocity of body and mind.
As I will show, their letters as they were nearing death – Seward’s Letters
(1811) and Robinson’s personal letters (1800), a group of which were published as
Original Letters (1822) – confront the reader with this struggle to represent mean-
ingfully the experience of being in physical pain while trying to write. To preserve
themselves as authors, to counter negative cultural attitudes about women writers,
about their excessive styles, about the unproductive disabled body, and about
the suffering body of sensibility, they had to distinguish themselves from Smith
and re-imagine the relationship between their writing and their bodies.15 These
late letters reveal both authors crafting alternative identities – other models of
sensibility – in which physical suffering simultaneously threatens and instigates
writing. Though one could also use this framework for examining their sonnets in
relation to Smith’s model, I have chosen to examine the letters because the conflict
over sonnet form that shaped these women poets’ relationship to one another
takes a backseat to the discourse of sensibility and personal suffering. In addi-
tion, the semi-private space of the letter allows for conversation about corporality
that would not be permissible in the public sphere. In these final letters, writing
pain – both writing about pain and the pain of writing – became a way to articu-
late a reality in which the material body and the creative mind were intricately
intertwined.
Though each carefully managed their final projects, their editors nonetheless
framed their texts with another traditional trope for understanding sickly writing
subjects: the writer who transcends the limits of bodily suffering in the powers of
the mind/text. Rather than privileging mind over body or reading disabled, sick
bodies as signs of some deficiency, inner corruption, or a failing mind, conven-
tional late eighteenth-century understandings of disabled bodies, Seward’s and
Robinson’s texts show instead that, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘the perceiving
mind is an incarnated mind’.16 As women whose beauty garnered them attention
and as successful writers now with failing bodies at the end of their literary careers,
Seward and Robinson sought to validate their corporal pain as highly productive,

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a source of writing: if writing increased bodily pain, bodily pain also increased
writing.17
Some of the last representations of these two poets reveal how their lameness
evoked the discourse of sensibility and shaped their reputations. In a letter to Mrs.
Anna Eliza Bray written on 21 March 1833, Robert Southey describes his first
image of Seward when he and Mary Barker visited her in 1808, the year before she
died:
Miss Seward … had a great deal of natural ardour, tho it was often expressed in
so artificial a way, that it had the appearance of affected enthusiasm. I once past
two days at her house, xxx having xxx <known> her before only by letters. A lady
with whom I was very intimate, & who had a quick sense of the ludicrous … was
present at the introduction … Miss Seward was at her writing desk, – she was
then not short of 70, & <very> lame in consequence of frequent accidents to one
of her knees. Her head dress was quite youthful, <with> flaxen ringlets, – more
beautiful eyes I never saw in any human countenance, -they were youthful, – &
her spirit & manners were youthful too, – & there was so much warmth & liveli-
ness & cordiality, that xxx except the ringlets – xxxx every thing would have made
you forget that she was old. This however was the impression with which I left her;
the first scene was the most tragi-comic, – or comico-tragic that it was ever my
fortune to be engaged in. After a greeting so complimentary that I would gladly
have xx insinuated myself into a nutshell to have xxx been hidden from it, she told
me that she had that minute finished transcribing some verses upon one of my
Poems, – she would read them to me, & entreated me to point out any thing which
I thought ought be amended in them – I took my seat, & by favour of a blessed
table, placed my elbow so that I could hide my face by leaning it upon my hand, &
have the help of that hand to keep down the risible muscles, while I listened to my
own praise & glory set forth in sonorous rhymes, & declaimed by one who read
with theatrical effect.18
Seward here appears as a ‘comico-tragic’ figure to Southey, lame and old despite
her youthful spirit and headdress. She performs as in the 1770s poetry compe-
titions, but by the early nineteenth century this effusive mode is outdated and
excruciating to Southey. He tries not to laugh at her theatrical and overzealous
reading of a poem she has written on his verse, but, as his superlatives emphasize,
everything about Seward – her dress, her manner, her poetic style – is excessive,
‘affected enthusiasm’. She becomes a parodic figure of sensibility, right out of one
of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plays, and her lameness supports this ludicrous
image, more a result of clumsiness (‘frequent accidents’) than a medical complaint.
By contrast, Robinson’s lameness makes her a tragic figure to Lætitia-Matilda
Hawkins, when she sees ‘the then helpless paralytic Perdita!’ in the waiting-rooms
of the opera house. Hawkins stages Robinson’s decline as a sentimental scene in
which her failing body signifies the decline of her fame:
On a table in one of the waiting-rooms of the Opera House, was seated a woman
of fashionable appearance, still beautiful, but not ‘in the bloom of beauty’s pride’;
she was not noticed, except by the eye of pity. In a few minutes, two liveried

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servants came to her, they took from their pockets long white sleeves, which they
drew on their arms, they then lifted her up and conveyed her to her carriage; – it
was the then helpless paralytic Perdita! The scenery preceding her dissolution,
afforded perhaps more steps of decline, but she was known no more.19
Hawkins’s theatrical language, reinforced by the setting, exhumes Robinson’s

earlier career as an actress. Robinson’s faded beauty and her crippled condition
make her unrecognizable until she is lifted into her carriage by two men. Then,
the eye of pity notices her only as the ‘helpless paralytic Perdita’, not as an author.
Robinson becomes a pitiable object; her bodily state signifies not just ‘her dissolu-
tion’ but also the dissolute path that brought her there. Hawkins’s sentimental
language marks Robinson’s fallen status; she is reduced to a position with only one
conclusion: to be ‘known no more’.20
Far from the sympathetic, melancholy speaker of Smith’s sonnets, these two
vignettes highlight how complicated sensibility had become by the Romantic
period. As different as they are, however, both use that discourse to devalue their
subjects’ authorial status: Southey mocks Seward’s outdated sensibility; Hawkins
deploys her superior sensibility to assess Robinson’s decline. In both instances,
the women’s significance turns on a judgement of their non-normative bodies by
their observers. Lennard Davis claims that ‘narrativizing an impairment … tends
to sentimentalize it’.21 Such narratives evoke laughter or pity from the reader
and objectify the disabled individual. In contrast to these images, however, one
is struck by the anti-sentimentalism of Seward’s and Robinson’s letters as they
approached death. They may be grumpy, garrulous, weary and overcome, but they
keep writing. However much they try to elicit some pity from their correspond-
ents, they also aggressively assert their authority as authors and public figures,
agents in their own right. Without transition, both writers move from detailing
their ailments to touting their literary accomplishments or criticizing a fellow
writer. In these last letters, they continually exploit the tension between material
demands and literary desires to authorize their writing selves through voices quite
distinct from the ones Smith, their most significant rival for literary fame, had
constructed in Elegiac Sonnets.
Poetic Pain: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

With its feeling men and its suffering women, the culture of sensibility had put the
nervous body at the centre.22 Developing from new medical understandings about
the human body and philosophical theories of sympathy, its focus on the emotional
sensitivity of its subjects emphasized the reciprocity of body and mind.23 Such sub-
jects were susceptible and excitable; they responded readily to environmental influ-
ences, both internally and externally, and registered those influences in corporal
signs – sighs, tears, swoons, blushes.24 Given the supposedly greater delicacy of
women’s nerves, sensibility was potentially a source of empowerment, a means of
valuing female emotion and, therefore, women’s responsiveness, their bodies, and

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their knowledge. As Claire Knowles argues, ‘the discourse of sensibility gave women
a powerful avenue through which to publicize (and often politicize) their experi-
ences of bodily and emotional suffering’.25 It foregrounded a dynamic in which,
according to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, observers could register
sympathetic identification across social differences in their emotional responses to
others.26 Through such identification, women could not only express their compas-
sion, but also articulate their own pain. In its ideal form, sensibility offered new
possibilities for subjectivity because at its centre was a relationship in which each
person was potentially subject and object, agent and observed, reader and text.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, corporal markers of sensitivity
were also being interpreted, often contradictorily, through emerging theories of
physiognomy and gesture. From Joshua Reynolds’s portraits to David Garrick’s
acting, the belief in correspondence between bodily sign and inner character
permeated British culture – so much so that the physiognomic theories of John
Kaspar Lavatar, first translated into English in 1789, seemed to readers more a
corroboration than an innovation.27 If the intertwining of ‘the mind in the body’,
in Jerome McGann’s words, valued emotional response as a form of knowledge,
it also made psychology legible in physiological response.28 Women’s bodies thus
seemed legible in new ways. Female sufferers became, paradoxically, figures of
both potency and incapacity. According to G.J. Barker-Benfield, sensibility ‘on the
one hand was associated with the power of intellect, imagination, the pursuit of
pleasure, the exercise of moral superiority, and wished-for resistance to men. On
the other, it betokened physical and mental inferiority, sickness and inevitable vic-
timization, circumstances throwing severe doubt on the effectiveness of the female
will.’29 In effect, a woman of sensibility was by definition suffering and potentially
sick; the question was how that suffering would register publicly: Was it a sign of
strength or weakness? Propriety or perversity? More importantly, was her suffer-
ing authentic or affected?
Clarissa Harlowe, the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s eponymous novel
(1747–48), provided an early, foundational model of authentic, virtuous suffering.
She exemplified ‘virtue’s triumph in the body’s defeat’, according to John Mullan;
her ‘sensibility [was] not so much spoken as displayed. Its instrument … a mas-
sively sensitized, feminine body.’30 Clarissa preserves her virtue, however, at great
cost; she ‘dies because of her nervous sensibility’, her body and mind not merely
reinforcing one another but at war.31 While sensibility paradoxically empowers
and nullifies Clarissa, Charlotte Smith shrewdly exploits its potential in Elegiac
Sonnets, claiming moral superiority in her relentless suffering as an enabling sub-
jectivity.32 This more viable model of suffering sensibility portrays mental distress
as a source of unrelenting poetic creativity and female agency in the public sphere.
Not a fictional character, Smith led a life of extreme hardship and used her writing
to invest that suffering with literary and economic meaning. To do this, she effaced
Clarissa’s speaking body and, instead, voiced sensibility in aestheticized poetic
tropes. As both lyric subject and grieving observer, the doggedly suffering, forlorn
speaker of her sonnets is both a pitiable object and a vital creative source.33 In

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contrast to Clarissa, she wanders the countryside and mobilizes her suffering in
the cause of melancholy reflection, turning the sonnet into a site of ‘some lonely
feeling … deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature’.34 As Sarah
Zimmerman argues, Smith’s persona in Elegiac Sonnets ‘was already available – the
heroine of sensibility – but she revitalized the story by providing her readers with
details from her own life – an ongoing plot’.35 Creating a private world of reflec-
tion, Smith sought to draw her readers into an intimate relationship, giving them
‘the spectacle of [her] autobiographical speaker lamenting her plight in natural
settings’.36 Part of that intimacy depended on the illusion of ‘real woe’, as the
anonymous author of ‘Sonnet to Mrs. Smith’ named it.37 Her melancholy signi-
fied sincerely, but it also denied readers a physical body to ground that woe. These
innovations effectively remade the suffering woman of sensibility into a valuable
figure for women writers.
Poetry and suffering define Smith’s speaker’s subjectivity; writing pain – the
pain of writing and the writing of pain – constitutes the female poet. Throughout
Elegiac Sonnets, Smith presents herself as a ‘poor, wearied pilgrim – in this toiling
scene’ (Sonnet IV), whose suffering leaves her ‘to complain /Thro’ life unpitied,
unrelieved, unknown’, but she also continues to write, as her continually expand-
ing editions indicate. As she declaims in the opening sonnet, ‘The partial Muse has
from my earliest hours / Smiled on the rugged path I’m doomed to tread’, even
as she blames: ‘Her dear delusive art’ that ‘Points every pang, and deepens every
sigh.’ Yet the speaker provides no locus for this ‘pang’. She is ‘wearied from the
‘toiling scene’ and ‘rugged path’, but such language reads figuratively, as meta-
phors for life’s difficulties. Despite their specific locations (the South Downs, the
River Arun), the sonnets’ generalized language of pain is rarely grounded in an
actual physical complaint; though ‘elegiac’, they provide no concrete object of
mourning. As readers noted, the material content of ‘real woe’ was elided in the
sonnets, despite their authenticity of feeling.38
Instead, Smith exploited the dynamic of sensibility by positioning her sonnets’
speaker(s) as subjects who privately express their pain in order to become valid
objects of the reader’s sympathy. Elizabeth Dolan argues that ‘in Smith’s portrayal
of suffering, the cult of sensibility’s object of sympathy and sympathizing onlooker
are contained in one body’.39 The physical suffering of that one body, however,
is displaced on to the scene before her, and what matters is the poetic agency (I)
created through the speaker’s gaze (eye). For example, in Sonnet LXX: ‘On being
cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea, because it was
frequented by a lunatic’, the speaker intently observes the torment of ‘a solitary
wretch’ (1) on ‘the giddy brink’ (9) and uses his physical pain to assert her own
afflicted state: ‘He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know / The depth or
duration of his woe’ (13–14). Both sympathetic observer and pathetic object, the
speaker here validates her virtuous suffering through a comparison that reminds
her readers of her greater self-consciousness, the source of her poetic authority; the
lunatic’s frenzied physical state serves to reveal her deeper mental affliction and,
simultaneously, the emotional control of her poetic craft.

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Crippling Sensibility: Rembodying the Suffering Woman Writer

As Smith’s example reveals, for late eighteenth-century women writers the discourse
of sensibility became an increasingly complex behavioural code and aesthetic style.
Her sonnets’ sincerity turned suffering sensibility into a model of genteel feminin-
ity and poetic authority. Her immense success depended on creating a thoughtful
female sufferer worthy of sympathy, a figure of sincere sensibility whose private
reflections demonstrated her genius and pain.40 She achieved this by effacing the
physical body – both its literal sickness and its sexuality. However, as readers came
to know Smith’s ‘real woes’, the more she complained of her actual situation, the
more pitiful an object she became. If valuing suffering had created ‘an enabling
space for female poetic production’, by the end of the eighteenth century, the sick
female body of sensibility was increasingly used as a cautionary tale to regulate
female behaviour.41 By the time Seward and Robinson were focused on building
their reputations, the meaning of female suffering was highly contested as sensi-
bility was increasingly interpreted as weakness and artifice. While Wordsworth’s
‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ came to represent imaginative power,
the suffering female body increasingly signified hysteria and sexual transgression if
it was not channelled into proper feminine outlets.42
Signifiers of sensibility could be interpreted equally as symptoms of immorality
and perverse, debilitating sickness, the sensible body as pathological. As Marianne
Dashwood learns, excessive sensibility makes you dangerously ill; its path to
improper feminine behaviour is life-threatening. Consumption, the disease of sen-
sibility, may have been in some spheres a glamorous Romantic disease and sign
of poetic genius, but that representation coexisted with a discourse that mocked
sensibility and read suffering as a sign of the body and mind out of control.43 This
interpretation was so common that James Gillray’s The New Morality (August
1798), a print satirising late eighteenth-century radical thinkers, could present
Sensibility (with her sister grotesques Philanthropy and Justice) as an emaciated,
sickly woman who sentimentally weeps for the dead bird in her hand as she stands
on the King’s head. Such conservative viewpoints equated sensibility and sickness
as reciprocal signs of degeneracy, but the radical side with which Robinson identi-
fied made a similar equation. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, whose attack on sensibility epitomizes this shift in the discourse, inverts
the picture of the virtuous Clarissa on her sickbed. Sprawled on her couch, starv-
ing, this ‘weak and depraved being’, an ‘irrational monster’, ‘proud of her delicacy
and sensibility’, ignores her familial duties to flaunt her weakened state.44 Barker-
Benfield describes Wollstonecraft’s image as ‘cripplingly exaggerated sensibility’,
as if exaggerated sensibility, especially theatrical sensibility, itself made you lame.
As my examples suggest, this was exactly the association of behaviour and style,
body and mind, that Seward and Robinson had to confront.45
For poets for whom sensibility had been a marker of their aesthetic value and
a cause of derision, Smith’s persona in Elegiac Sonnets became a fraught identity
to negotiate. Seward and Robinson may have published poems before Smith saw

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Elegiac Sonnets into print, but this did not stop Smith’s model – thanks to her rapid
and meteoric success – from complicating their authorial lives. In particular, they
were confronted by two troubling issues: their writing styles had been criticized as
insincere for their excessive sensibility;46 and, at the ends of their careers, they also
inhabited sick, failing bodies that threatened the very act of writing.47 How could a
woman writer whose style was interpreted as exaggerated sensibility achieve legiti-
macy through a model founded on sincerity? How could a woman whose body was
so present – first as a site of her sexual and literary reputation and now as a locus of
pain – use a model that erased the material, performative aspects, both sexual and
sickly, of the sensible body? If Seward’s and Robinson’s literary authority derived
its power from the very discourse that defined their illnesses, any representation of
suffering was already overdetermined by responses to their poetic styles.
In the 1780s and early 1790s, attacks on Seward’s and Robinson’s theatrical styles
– their effusive enthusiasm and their consciousness of performing to a responsive
audience – attempted to deauthorize them by identifying them with the extravagant,
erotic Italianate verse of the Della Cruscans.48 While reviewers praised the simple,
sincere elegance of Smith’s sonnets, they called Seward’s and Robinson’s poems
‘tinsel’, a word most often used to attack the Della Cruscans. Though extremely
popular, the Della Cruscan coterie was also controversial, and reviewers frequently
connected their excessive sensibility with a tendency to revel in the ‘tinsel splendor
of Language’.49 The Della Cruscans wielded the language of sensibility erotically
and humorously; if they emphasized style over substance, it was in part so that the
eroticism of the poems could push sexual limits and thus maximize their readers’
titillation.50 Robinson’s 1791 Poems, published by John Bell, editor/owner of The
World where she had published in the Della Cruscan exchanges, was written off
by the English Review as imitations of the Della Cruscans that ‘dazzled by the glare
of their tinsel’.51 William Gifford took this connection one step further when he
belittled Robinson’s writing as ‘tinkling trash’ and interpreted her disabled body
as a well-deserved result of her promiscuity, a sign of a perverted, crippling sensi-
bility.52 While Robinson had been a Della Cruscan and at least mentions Smith’s
sonnets favourably in her novel, Walsingham, Seward refused to be associated
with either Smith’s ‘everlasting lamentables … made up of hackneyed scraps of
dismality’ or the distasteful, vulgar poetry of the Della Cruscans.53 Smith provided
Seward with a negative model to react against. Nonetheless, in 1796, when Seward
published Llangollen Vale, with other Poems, the English Review accused her of the
same crime as Robinson: ‘With her favourite Pope before her, we are surprised
that she has rather chosen to imitate the obscurity, tinsel and tortuosity of the
Della Cruscan school, than the language of nature and genuine taste.’54 Identified
with the Della Cruscans, Seward’s and Robinson’s styles – and thus their i dentities
– could then be read as insincere, affected, disfigured by excessive effusiveness,
meretricious even.
By the ends of their lives, not only was that kind of poetry devalued, but it had
also positioned the two women poets as public performers, potentially shedding
doubt on the authenticity of their pain. Moreover, cultural understandings of

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suffering were shifting away from bodily interpretations to social ones, because of
work like Wollstonecraft’s and Smith’s.55 The reality of Seward’s and Robinson’s
unconventional lives, their effusive sensibilities, and their visibly failing bodies
meant that Smith’s model was insufficient to their experiences. They needed to
articulate their authorial reputations in new ways, and they chose their final letters
as one place for that revaluing. While their published poems might also be read in
this light (the focus of a different article), the semi-private space of letters offered
freedom to move fluidly between physical pain and literary production because of
their trust in their correspondents. Thus, while Seward and Robinson, like Smith,
represent suffering as central to the female writing subject’s literary production,
they reimagine her disembodied model to foreground the reciprocity between
the physical body and the creative mind. Moreover, while Smith’s speaker was a
wanderer, they were mostly housebound as they neared death, confined to one
place because of their lameness. In these letters, they situate the writing subject in
her domestic space, not in a natural setting; but whereas the wandering of Smith’s
speaker enhances her privacy, the confinement of Seward’s and Robinson’s accen-
tuates their public authority. Writing pain in these letters reclaims the sensible
body as a site where pain and writing produce one another, where corps and
corpus become productively intertwined.
Seward’s Writing Pain: An ‘exuberance of wailful egotism’

Seward was a compulsive writer; her ailments made her more so, countering ideas of
the disabled body as unproductive even as she bemoaned her state. Writing to Mrs
Childers of Yorkshire in April 1801 after a fall that left her bedridden and fearful
of ‘hopeless and helpless imprisonment’, she called her own description of her
physical state ‘this exuberance of wailful egotism’.56 Her self-consciousness about
the egotism of such description makes it no less about self, but also draws attention
to the act of writing about pain. The phrase, ‘exuberance of wailful egotism’, which
might have been used by her critics to describe the letters more generally, provides
a powerful counter to the suffering sensibility of Smith’s ‘everlasting lamentables’.
The phrase recalls Coleridge’s critique of reviewers who condemned poems like
his, especially sonnets, for their ‘querulous egotism’ and Smith’s repetition of that
phrase, twice, in her Preface to the Volume II of Elegiac Sonnets (1797) to counter
critics who accused her of ‘feigning sorrow’.57
The distress of Smith’s sonnets may have been lamentable, but the sonnets were
deplorable to Seward, who read their style as vulgar. Questioning Smith’s sincer-
ity, she calls them ‘compositions of mere mediocrity’, comprised of ‘pretty tuneful
centos from our various poets, without anything original’; such ‘plagiarism’, she
exclaims, ‘makes one sick’.58 By contrast, Seward’s self-critical choice of ‘wailful’
over ‘querulous’ highlights the legitimacy of her suffering, evoking synonyms like
‘plaintive’ and ‘mournful’ that had been used by other reviewers to endorse Smith’s
sonnets. If she recognizes the ‘egotism’ of her complaint, she nonetheless validates
the grievousness of her pain. This cry emanates naturally from the bodily self. Its

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‘exuberance’, a word from the discourse of sensibility, however, means it is not

querulous, not petulant, but rather abundant, original and vital, a spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings. Such a moment seems parallel for Seward to a
poetic ‘impromptu’ in which ‘the lines ran off from my pen after first perusing
[a] poem’.59 Her self-reflexive gesture reinvests the suffering, sensible body with
meaning, reminding the reader of the writer’s crafting of the image. Even as this
bodily state threatens ‘life-long imbecility [that] sickens at my heart, and withers
the energy of my mind’, its exuberance instigates copious literary production.60
In the very next sentence, Seward shifts to literary concerns. While Smith’s
speaker wanders the landscape, Seward’s travels across her own diverse liter-
ary terrain. She is soothed by Mrs Childers’ ‘warm encomiums on [her] letters
to Mr. Jerningham, on the subject of pulpit oratory’, recently published in The
Gentleman’s Magazine; she praises her friend’s ‘disciplined’ mind and heart by
alluding to ‘the sixty-sixth of my published sonnets’; and hints at her aptitude for
translating Racine’s poetry. She exclaims to her friend:
Ah! I shall never again have spirits to attempts a new poetic task; and, besides, you
have heard me express my accordance with Dr. Johnson’s opinion, that moral
precepts, religious hopes, and pious ejaculations, have a better effect when they
naturally arise out of lighter subjects in poetry, than when they form its professed
and exclusive theme. I trust my publications are not destitute of such precepts,
hopes, and aspirations. My sonnets have been publicly praised for having liberally
involved them.61
Here, Seward describes the public praise of her sonnets to affirm her sense of
them as sources of moral authority. The movement between physical ailment and
self-congratulation stresses her public identity as poet. In the very next letter to
Reverend R. Fellowes, on 1 June 1801, she begins by complaining that her ill health
and ‘incurable maim’ have silenced her. ‘Intellectual energy and heart-sick dejec-
tion’, she stresses, ‘are seldom compatible, except under the goad of imperious
necessity.’62 She then launches into a lengthy discourse on Gray, Young, Cowper
and Bloomfield and her father’s exclusion from Dr Parr’s ‘list of literary charac-
ters of Cambridge’, a sure sign that the body provides ‘imperious necessity’ for
‘intellectual energy’.63
In opposition to Smith’s plagiarisms, Seward claims original judgements, both
in her poetry and in her criticism, that arise from her more discerning sensibility.
Whether or not Smith likes her writing, she tells William Hayley, ‘cannot change
the nature of my perceptions’, which come from ‘involuntary opinion’ and a sense
of true ‘taste’.64 Relying on the connection between aesthetics and behaviour central
to the discourse of sensibility, Seward thus invalidates Smith’s writing on the very
grounds for which she had been praised: sincere sensibility. Those sonnets are
insincere, their style, derivative; if they elevate suffering, they do so at the expense
of literary talent and critical judgement. In contrast, Seward’s published Letters,
written between 1784 and 1807, offer an alternative persona, equally sanctioned
by the discourse of sensibility, but one whose critical voice refuses to accede to

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the body’s suffering or Smith’s popularity. Instead, the exuberant precision of her
criticisms reveals a writer who believes her performance presents her sensibility
sincerely. The physical ailments become part of the performance, often melodra-
matic, and are intricately bound up with the writing. Though Seward describes her
‘dizzy malady’ and her lameness as threats to her writing, the disjunction between
her physical complaints and her critical confidence belies her fears.65
As early as the spring of 1794, Seward’s physical impairments became a sig-
nificant part of her letters’ narrative; there she marks the change in her health as
originating when she fractured her patella at the age of 23. Her letter of 20 March
1794 to Mrs Stokes, for example, highlights both the sense of crisis she has from
that injury and its effect on her will to write: ‘Some deep-seated malady incapaci-
tates me from taking any exercises, corporal or intellectual, without painful dif-
ficulty. Of the first, all that my strength will bear is necessary to be tried; the latter
is destruction to me.’66 The ambiguity of the last phrase, ‘the latter is destruction to
me’, obscures whether the difficulty of intellectual exercise is destructive of self or
whether the lack of intellectual exercise is destruction to her. This letter, like many
of her letters, balances physical complaint with pointed literary critique, in this
instance of Samuel Johnson.
At one moment in 1796, having travelled alone to the spa town of Harrogate
to cure herself, Seward imagines her ‘unknowing and unknown’ authorial self
simultaneously imbibing a noxious medicine while copying out her sonnets for
the printer.67 This image provides a striking contrast with the dying Clarissa or
the wandering pilgrim of Smith’s sonnets; housebound, the female sufferer does
not lie abed, but holds medicine in one hand, sonnets in the other, in a compli-
cated balancing act that suggests their equal significance in her life. In letter after
letter, Seward performs this balancing act by giving physical pain and her critique
of contemporary literature (including Wordsworth, Southey, Gray, Coleridge,
Pope, Cowper, Walpole, Scott, Montagu and many others) equal billing. A letter
written on 7 March 1805 begins with a lengthy paragraph in which she complains
that reading and writing bring on ‘the present excess of a malady to which I have
been subject these many past years; – a dizziness of head, in more or less degree,
always upon me, and which has … increased with dangerous force, amounting
to sudden paroxysms, in which all the surrounding objects seem falling into
chaos’.68 This painful state, she explains, not only requires an amanuensis for
her letters but also threatens ‘a gloomy suspension of every intellectual industry’.
But in the next breath she writes, ‘And now, to exchange this comfortless theme
for one on which a genius has poured his animating lustre – the Lay of the Last
Minstrel.’ There follows several pages of close literary analysis of Walter Scott’s
poem and an enclosure of one of her own poems. Even if a knee injury left her
‘subject to the constantly impending danger of falling’, the persona of the letters
was far from that of a suffering invalid.69 Intertwined with her criticism, suffering
highlighted her sensibility, the same sensibility that made possible her criticism.
That writing also revealed her sensibility and subjected her to more potential
pain.

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The most interesting letters for examining this recalibrated narrative of suffer-
ing and writing are those to Scott, to whom Seward bequeathed her poetic works
for publication. Seward and Scott’s literary friendship began as early as 1802 when
he sent her some of his poetry for comment. Though Scott grudgingly edited
the poetry, calling ‘most of it absolutely execrable’, he had benefited from her
patronage and her public defence of him.70 Their literary debates in the letters are
extensive, but she also frequently reminds him of the paroxysms that threatened
such communiqués. This is not, however, a Smithian appeal for sympathy, but a
reminder of her material reality. In a letter to Scott on 25 June 1806, Seward sug-
gests that her letters should be read as twice as substantial because of her situation:
‘Fortunate for you that, that I, who never know how to lay down my pen when it
has been taken upon to address you, am obliged by malady, and by much writing,
to avoid intruding often on any individual Friend. Therefore I pray you to consider
each letter of mine, when it arrives, as two.’71 This passage strikingly indicates the
double and intertwined pull of malady and writing. If she does not write to Scott
frequently enough, it is because she is ill and because she is writing; both equally
affect her correspondence, and yet both also heighten the value of the letters she
sends. As Teresa Barnard, one of her biographers, notes, Seward had begun ‘to
associate letter writing with ill health’.72 Nonetheless, she describes writing as a
‘furore’ that takes hold of her, a corporeal excess in which all she can think about
are the problems of publication.
Scott’s ‘Biographical Preface’ in the Poetical Works, itself a narrative of Seward’s
decline, also highlights this tension between body and text. The final letters he
included reveal that as Seward’s malady increased so did her motivation to shore
up her literary reputation, as she planned out in minute detail the posthumous
publication of her letters and poetry. She continued to write against the will of
her doctors, fighting corporal pressures. ‘Much writing is forbid me; indeed, its
effect is sufficiently forewarning, since, the moment I begin to think intensely, the
pen falls from my hand, and a lethargic sensation creeps over me, and I doze’, she
writes Scott on 6 March 1809.73 Writing pain here both ensures her identity as a
writer and threatens to undo that identity. Yet her final letter – what Scott calls a
‘posthumous letter’ as if she were writing after death – tells him precisely what to
do with the poems she has bequeathed to him for publication. She reminds him,
‘This letter has been written beneath the pressure of much pain and illness’, but she
also exhorts him to preserve her reputation. These missives show how ‘Authority
[literary reputation] itself is frequently not more irresistible than are those viewless
and inaudible despots that influence our locomotive powers’.74 The Letters thus
simultaneously create Seward’s image as literary critic and form an alternative
image of the suffering writing subject, turning physical impairment into a source
of literary strength even while recognizing its costs. They remind her readers that
the sensible body was both a source of prose and pain; for the woman writer who
valued her poetic and critical sensibility confronted with a failing body, these were
mutually reinforcing, both necessary to her authorial identity.

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Robinson’s Writing Pain: Reauthorising the Disabled Body

With her auburn hair and flashing eyes, Seward was a beauty amongst her circle,
but because she was financially independent that beautiful body had not defined
her to the same extent as Robinson’s had.75 Because of her history as courte-
san and fashion icon, Robinson’s physical alteration was not only more publicly
visible but also more personally fraught. When she became disabled, many critics
implied that it resulted from her earlier behaviour, reading her paralytic body
as a symptom of her immorality and a sign of perverted sensibility. To compli-
cate matters, Robinson had also exploited her body and her sexual history in her
writing as source material. The extent of her fall may be registered in the 1799
comments of two creditors who invaded her sickroom in Englefield Cottage and
snidely retorted, ‘who … could believe, she had once been called the beautiful
Mrs. Robinson’.76 Robinson was highly aware of how her disabled body signified
to her critics, and she worked to create an authorial image that would counter that
signification. Unlike Smith, her suffering meant labouring to write without social
recognition, to be reduced publicly to the pains of the body without its intellectual
rewards. Unlike Seward, it meant labouring without regular financial support, to
be forced to write while sick. As she writes in the last of the Original Letters: ‘To
endure the most unexampled, bodily pain, with a mind unsoothed by the consola-
tions of society! – I, – I! who have lived in the very zenith of brilliant pleasures,
who have been, perhaps undeservedly, beloved even to idolatry, – to be driven
from the world – to labour in undelighted solitude.’77
Though she had published before her accident, Robinson turned to her writing
career with greater zeal after her paralysis; her literary production increased expo-
nentially as her physical state deteriorated. If she complained that her disabled
body now trapped her in new ways, she also sought to imagine the relationship
between that body and her writing. Like Seward, Robinson’s writing at the end
of her life expresses her concern with securing her authorial reputation. Even
more than Seward, she had to negotiate pejorative public images that represented
her sensibility as insincere and affected. And like Seward, her increasing decline
escalated her physical complaints, limited her mobility, and, simultaneously,
led to intense productivity – many letters, her Memoirs, her Lyrical Tales, and
almost forty poems in The Morning Post just in the last six months of her life. In
Robinson’s case behaviour and aesthetics had reinforced one another; such a con-
nection between improper femininity and meretricious style, I suggest, invalidated
her suffering and potentially her authorship. Though Robinson responded more
subtly to Smith than Seward, Smith’s model of disembodied, private suffering
was even more problematic for her because of the greater role her body played in
shaping her reputation.78 Confined to her bed in Englefield Cottage, she sought
to preserve a public identity through her work for The Morning Post and by con-
structing her Poetical Works, literally using her mind to transform the limits of
her body into a public presence. However, that writing made her bodily restric-
tions more visible. Writing pain became for her an act of self-authorization that

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revalued the relationship between her body and her writing in order to prove the
reality of her suffering and the sincerity of her sensibility.
Robinson’s supporters often portrayed her writing as a compensation for her
crippled state; her genius, they extolled, transcended her physical limitations.79
Robinson, however, highlighted the imbrication of bodily pain and writing instead
of denying it. Her invocation of ‘The written troubles of the brain’ – the same
phrase from Macbeth that Smith used in Sonnet XL to emphasize her mental
suffering – suggests that she saw physiology and writing as inextricably intercon-
nected.80 In light of the real lancets that were reducing Robinson’s body to ‘a mere
spectre’, Mr Index’s direction to Martha Morley to use a lancet for a pen in The
Natural Daughter seems recuperative; refigured as a pen, the lancet becomes a sign
of productivity not illness, a metonym for the sick body as a source of writing.81
Robinson’s Memoirs (1801) do rely on a narrative of creative transcendence, but
they also foreground her paradoxical material state, at once imprisoning and ena-
bling, threatening and inspirational; they redefine the suffering body as an essential
aspect of the writing subject. Partly written by Robinson and completed posthu-
mously by other hands, they tell the story of the growth of the poet’s mind as a
disability narrative. At the end, the narrative vacillates from sentence to sentence
between the intellectual sustenance of the literary projects and the debilitating
effects of the body, creating an intimate and complex relationship between disa-
bled body and written text. For example, in one of the last paragraphs, her ‘last
literary performance’, Lyrical Tales, restores her mind to
its accustomed and favorite pursuits; but the toil of supplying the constant variety
required by a daily print, added to other engagements, which she almost despaired
of being capacitated to fulfil, pressed heavily upon her spirits, and weighed down
her enfeebled frame. Yet, in the month of August, she began and concluded, in the
course of ten days, a translation of Dr. Hager’s ‘Picture of Palermo’ – an exertion
by which she was greatly debilitated …
She yet continued, though with difficulty, and many intervals, her literary
avocations. When necessitated by pain and languor to limit her exertions, her
unfeeling employers accused her of negligence … her mind seemed to acquire
strength in proportion to the weakness of her frame … [S]he would even herself,
at intervals, cherish the idea [of recovery]: but these gleams of hope, like flashes of
lightning athwart the storm, were succeeded by a deeper gloom … Within a few
days of her decease, she collected and arranged her poetical works, … and also the
present memoir.82
In its many turns, this passage traces out a constant interchange between physi-
cal decline and intense literary production. Paralysis, here, becomes a source of
writing even as it threatens the writing subject.
Robinson’s letters in the last part of 1800, including the fifteen Original Letters
published in 1822, present this chiasmatic relationship between body and text more
overtly. The physical and economic limitations of her situation produce a con-
tinual movement between anxiety about her bodily impairment and her writing.
As Robinson expresses her experience of living in a declining body, however, she

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denies that such a body is unproductive, unworthy of art or recognition. On 27

August 1800, she complained to Jane Porter of two unpleasant companions, one
physical and one literary, that suggest she gave these two concerns equal weight:
the one a swelled ancle, which that by a violent degree of inflammation. (which thank
Heaven has disappeared for I should not admire a mutilated leg) alarmed me con-
siderably. The other torment was the German work of Doctor Hagar, The History
of Palermo, a little Volume, which I have finished translating, and which is now in
the press. I have also printing at Bristol (in the beautiful press of Biggs and Cottle)
a volume of Lyrical Tales; my favourite offspring.83
Four days after her letter to Porter she brags to Samuel Jackson Pratt that ‘I con-
tinue my daily labours / in the Post; all the Oberons, Tabithas, MR’s and indeed
all most of the poetry, you see there is mine’, even though she claims: ‘I am still tor-
mented by ill health.’ Both writing and physical debility torment her, but recipro-
cally so: writing causes more bodily pain, but pain also causes writing.
This reciprocity becomes central to Robinson’s self-presentation in the final
letters. The body’s lack of health leads to excess of text, literally produces ‘off-
spring’, new (textual) bodies, even creates the author. Lying in bed, Robinson
makes her body a source of writing, overtly in poems like ‘Written on a Sick-Bed’
(16 October 1800), or indirectly in forlorn characters like Mary, the poor singing
dame, and poor Marguerite from Lyrical Tales. Her sickroom becomes a space
in which she can ‘pour … forth the true language of my soul’. As her disabled
body painfully restricts her, it also gives rise to a more ‘true’ poetic discourse that
emanates from the centre of her being; body, mind, writing, soul – all are intercon-
nected. This writing effusively ‘pours forth’ and, in a sense, speaks her incarnated
self. Paradoxically, however, the excess of writing simultaneously creates more
bodily pain and threatens to erase the writing self. She tells Marshall on 4 August:
‘My head is so disordered, that I fear my brain will catch the contagion of pain, and
incapacitate me for all my scribbling propensities.’84 By 10 October, she writes to
Godwin, in an image recalling Seward’s, that she ‘dare not write any more – my
head becomes giddy and my hand refuses the office of guiding my pen’.85 By 19
October, she describes herself as ‘captive’ to her health: ‘I find myself extremely
feeble, and the work I am obliged to do for the paper, weekly, will long keep me
so. My poor brain is tortured upon the smallest exertion, and my spirits are daily
more and more subdued.’ Robinson’s description of her state shows the contend-
ing pressures of writing pain, as both body and writing reinforce one another and
produce further decline.
However, the worst situation would be not to write at all; lack of writing imperils
the authorial self that Robinson wants to preserve. Writing sustains her, literally
and literarily; writing about pain in particular affirms the writing subject in the face
of such suffering. Indeed, Robinson’s weakening health jeopardized her position
at The Morning Post, even as she continued to publish prolifically there. This was
an economic crisis, but it also undermined the reciprocal relationship between
body and writing that had become central to her identity and literary production.

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Her writing had countered pitiful and charitable responses to her physical state
by affirming her agency and her reputation; to forfeit the agency of the writing
subject was, in her eyes, to be reduced to an unvalued disabled body. If the pain
of writing jeopardized her authorial identity, writing about pain, which she did so
frequently in these last texts, revalued the body in pain as a site of sincere suffering
that enabled literary production.
Foregrounding this afflicted body provided a way to reclaim her sensibility as
an authentic ground for her literary reputation. In two letters to William Godwin
at the end of August 1800, written only a few months before her death, Robinson
asserts her present suffering to counter claims that she has ever been disingenu-
ous. Instead, she has been misinterpreted as an artificial creature when, in fact,
her sincere sensibility has led to corporal pain and loss of the literary reputation it
should have enhanced. She tells Godwin:
They have mistaken both my taste and my discernment; and in the person of what
they have considered a ‘fine Lady’ they have wounded the Being of all others,
perhaps, least meritting the appellation … In the broad circle of Society it is fre-
quently convenient, some will maintain that it is justifiable, to assume a character,
rather than to sustain one. I am a living proof that such artifice is advantageous,
and that to be ingenuous, is to ensure a long succession of pains and disappoint-
ments! Had I been an artificial creature – I might have been in wealth and vulgar
estimation, a creature to be envied! But the impetuosity of my temper; the irrita-
bility of my feelings; – the proud, indignant, resentful energy of my soul, placed a
barrier betwixt me and Fortune, which has thrown a gloom on every hour of my
existence.86
Robinson’s worries that she has been misinterpreted and perhaps mocked as a ‘fine
lady’, not seen as sincere like the genteel Smith. She stresses her authenticity and
suggests that the necessity of public performance leads to pain, if one is ‘ingenu-
ous’, a woman of ‘true’ sensibility. Her current bedridden state thus affirms her
sincere sensibility and reflects it back on her earlier character, even as she blames
that sensibility (‘the impetuosity of my temper, the irritability of my feelings’) for
causing her present pain. Her experience of ‘a long succession of pains and disap-
pointments’ has made her ‘too irritable, as well as too feeble, to bear the smallest
fatigue’, but it also sanctions writing pain. Now in a state of extreme sensibility, her
sincerity is visibly on display in her body and her writing. In other words, as the
epigraph to this article states, ‘her distress is the best voucher of her reputation’. Of
course, Robinson’s claim that she could not assume a character appears ironic to
readers today, whose interpretations begin from Robinson’s performative identity,
evidenced in the multiple poetic pseudonyms under which she wrote.87 The passage
thus also suggests how she has to reimagine her performative authorial self in rela-
tion to the literary value placed on the sincerity of Smithian sensibility. Only four
days later, when Godwin lauds her literary fame, she demands of him ‘how comes it
then that I am abused, neglected – unhonoured – unrewarded’? She complains that
her sensibility has helped to make her a ‘a wreck’.88 She chastises Godwin, telling
him he would recognize the integrity of her suffering, corporeally and literarily

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‘[h]ad even your Philosophy been so tried, Had you been, in the Spring and bloom
of Youth frost-nipped by sickness and consigned to a premature old age; Hurled
from the most flattering prospects of Delight and Fortune to contemplate a long
and dreary perspective, which only the Grave could terminate’.89 These descrip-
tions value the body’s sensibility even as they recognize its cost to her reputation.
Robinson uses her suffering body to make Godwin recognize her authentic self; she
asserts her worth by grounding her writing in that pain. Wholly sincere, she should
not be neglected and associated with the artifice and tinsel of the Della Cruscans,
she implies, because she has spoken only from her acute sensibility.
Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets negatively and positively shaped Seward’s and
Robinson’s understanding of themselves as authors at the ends of their lives, but
it could not provide them with a sustainable model given their poetic sensibilities
and their painful bodies. Her illegitimate form and disembodied persona could
not legitimize their embodied pain even if it made suffering a source of poetic
agency. Their corporal experiences both threatened and inspired their writing;
that writing also equally increased disability and made it meaningful in new ways.
According to Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell in the introduction to The Body
and Physical Difference, ‘such first person narratives provide readers with an alter-
native perspective on what it means to live with a disability in a culture obsessed
with forging equations between physical ability, beauty and productivity’.90
Seward’s and Robinson’s final letters crafted alternative perspectives to challenge
late eighteenth-century cultural attitudes that valued women as beautiful objects
and invalidated disabled bodies as signs of weakness or moral turpitude. They
reimagined Smith’s model to forge their literary reputations in a literary world that
devalued their suffering as false sensibility. Though their experiences were quite
different, the parallels traced here suggest how some women writers confronted
the normative attitudes of the literary marketplace by revaluing their corporal pain
as a source of literary production, while refusing to discard their bodies for their
minds, either as spiritual transcendence or as mental distress, as Smith’s Elegiac
Sonnets had. In their letters, Seward and Robinson instead emphasized the fun-
damental interconnectedness of body and mind, the writing subject as incarnated
mind, and they reminded their readers that suffering sensibility was grounded in
real bodies in pain. Writing pain for these two women writers was thus not only a
means to literary authority, but it also provided a way to make meaningful the lived
reality of writing in pain in a culture in which distress, to use Robinson’s words in
the epigraph, was seen as ‘the best voucher for reputation’.
Notes
1 Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003),
111.
2 These included the Swan of Avon (Shakespeare) and the Swan of Mantua (Virgil). For
Seward’s biography, see Teresa Barnard, Anna Seward: A Constructed Life, a Critical
Biography (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) and Claudia Kairoff, Anna Seward

IP: 141.101.132.179 On: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 19:40:41
and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2011).
3 See Timothy Webb, ‘Listing the Busy Sounds: Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and the
Poetic Challenge of the City’, in Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli (eds),
Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 80–111,
and Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet
Claim’, European Romantic Review, 6, 1 (Summer 1995), 98–127.
4 Review of Louisa; A Poetical Novel by Miss Seward, European Magazine (August 1784),
106; and ‘Continuation of our Critique on Miss Seward’s Louisa, a Novel, in Verse; and
Stricture on The Sorrows of Werter’, European Magazine, 7 (February 1785), 107.
5 Review of Poems (1793) by Mrs Robinson, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 64, 1 (1794), 57.
6 Robinson was first called Sappho when she published her first sonnet under the pseu-
donym Laura Maria for the Oracle, 28 July 1789. That identity was solidified by the
Monthly Review in its review of her 1791 Poems. See Daniel Robinson, The Poetry of
Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81, 38–9. On
1 September 1797 Seward was called ‘the Sapho of the Age’ in the Morning Post, to
which Robinson was at the time a regular contributor (D. Robinson, 115). In a letter to
Thomas Percy on 22 August 1811, Jane West called Seward the ‘British Sappho’ (John
Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the XVIII Century, 8 vols [London: J.B.
Nichols and Son, 1817–58], viii. 432).
7 Robinson’s Letter, first published pseudonymously in February 1799 under the name
Ann Frances Randall, was reissued under her own name in December with a slightly
changed title. ‘Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of
England’ was published in four monthly instalments in the The Monthly Magazine in
1800.
8 Later in her life, Charlotte Smith also had to deal with disability, most likely rheu-
matoid arthritis, which threatened the very act of writing. See Judith Philips Stanton,
The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2003).
9 See M. Nicolson and George S. Rousseau, This Long Disease, My Life: Alexander Pope
and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Helen Deutsch,
Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and E.M. Papper, ‘The Influence of Chronic
Illness on the Writings of Alexander Pope’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 82
(June 1989), 359–61.
10 Michael Gamer, ‘Introductory Note’ to Manon L’Escaut and The Romance of Real Life,
in The Works of Charlotte Smith, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), i. On the
‘sonnet claim’, see Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’.
11 Elizabeth A. Dolan, ‘British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,
Medical Discourse, and the Problem of Sensibility’, Journal of European Studies, 33,
3–4 (December 2003), www.questia.com/library/1G1–112483586/british-romantic-
melancholia-charlotte-smith-s-elegiac (accessed 6 March 2013).
12 ‘Sonnet to Mrs. Smith’, European Magazine (August 1786), 125; Pastor Fido, ‘On
Passing the Retreat of Charlotte Smith, near Chichester, in Sussex’, The World (7

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August 1788); and F., ‘Lines written immediately after reading Charlotte Smith’s
Elegies’, Whitehall Evening Post (14 November 1791).
13 The Gentleman’s Magazine 56 (April 1786), 334; John Thelwall, ‘An Essay on the
English Sonnet, illustrated by a comparison between the sonnets of Milton and those
of Charlotte Smith’, The Universal Magazine (December 1792), 408–14, 408–9.
14 Smith’s representation of mental suffering remains at the level of metaphor in Elegiac
Sonnets. Smith’s letters show how she later revised that model to account for her own
physical pain. On Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, see Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s
Literature of the Romantic Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte
Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003); and Sarah Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999).
15 Lennard Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult
Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. James M. Edie
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3.
17 Sharon Snyder, ‘Infinities of Form: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions’, in Sharon
Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (eds), Disability
Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: The Modern Language Association of
America, 2002), 173–96. Like Snyder, I am interested here in ‘the lived corporalities
that inform artistic production’ and how ‘disability experiences’ shape ‘artistic expres-
sion’ (173).
18 University of Rochester Rare Books Library, A.S727, 1:21. I am grateful to Tim Fulford
for sharing this letter with me from the forthcoming edition of Southey’s Letters, vol. 7,
Romantic Circle, www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/.
19 Lætitia-Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824), i. 34.
20 William Brewer, ‘Mary Robinson’s Paralysis and the Discourse of Disability;’ unpub-
lished manuscript (31 December 2010).
21 Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London:
Verso, 1995), 3–4.
22 On sensibility, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); John Brewer,
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London:
HarperCollins, 1997); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and
Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (New York: Routledge,
1993); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); and Ann
Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
23 In the medical field, this includes the work of George Cheyne, John Hunter, Charles
Bell, Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt, Astley Cooper and Humphrey Davy; in the
philosophical, it includes Lord Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume and Adam
Smith.

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24 See Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narrative: A Cultural History of Hysteria in
Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1997); Alan
Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); George S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards
Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III (Canberra:
Australian National University Press, 1976), 137–57; and Richard Sha, ‘Toward a
Physiology of the Romantic Imagination’, Configurations, 17 (2009), 197–226.
25 Claire Knowles, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy of
Charlotte Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 9.
26 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Augustus M. Kelley
Publishers, 1966).
27 See John Graham, ‘Lavater’s Physiognomy in England’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
22, 4 (October–December 1961), 561–72; Helen Deutsch on Lavater in ‘Exemplary
Aberration: Samuel Johnson and the English Canon’, in Snyder et al., Disability
Studies, 197–210; Juliet McMaster, Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Graeme Tytler, ‘Lavater and Physiognomy
in English Fiction, 1789–1832’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7, 3 (April 1995), 1–17,
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol7/iss3/5/ (accessed 25 March 2012).
28 Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 7.
29 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 36.
30 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 207, 61. See also R.F. Brissenden, Virtue
in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York:
Macmillan, 1974); and Van Sant. I am grateful to Samantha George for her advice on
this.
31 Raymond Stephanson, ‘Richardson’s “Nerves”: The Physiology of Sensibility in
Clarissa’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, 2 (April–June 1988), 268. See also Bill
Wandless, ‘Narrative Pain and Moral Sense: Towards an Ethics of Suffering in the Long
Eighteenth Century’, Literature and Medicine, 24, 1 (Spring 2005), 51–69.
32 My reading of Smith here is heavily influenced by Dolan, Labbe, Knowles and
Zimmerman.
33 See Dolan, Seeing Suffering, for another reading of this same dynamic.
34 This language is Coleridge’s in his preface to the second edition of Poems (1797), in
which he uses Smith and Bowles as his models for the sonnet.
35 Sarah Zimmerman, ‘Charlotte’s Smith’s Letters and the Practice of Self-Presentation’,
Princeton University Library Chronicle, 53, 1 (1991), 60. Recent critics have noted the
difference between the professional woman writer of Smith’s letters and the more self-
effacing persona of the sonnets, but Seward and Robinson would not have had access
to the letters.
36 Zimmerman, Romanticism, 39.
37 European Magazine (August 1786), 125.
38 For a more detailed analysis of this see Knowles, Sensibility.
39 Dolan, Seeing Suffering, 41.

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40 See Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing
Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and
Stephen Behrendt, British Women Writers and the Romantic Writing Community
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
41 Knowles, Sensibility, 2.
42 See, for example, Sir Alexander Crichton’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental
Derangement (1798); Dolan, Seeing Suffering, 25.
43 See Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 69–73.
44 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), 44.
45 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 361.
46 By 1797, when she published the new two-volume edition of the Sonnets, even Smith
felt a need to defend her authenticity, as she wrote in the preface, ‘That these are
gloomy, none will surely have a right to complain; for I never engaged they should be
gay. But I am unhappily exempt from the suspicion of feigning sorrow for an oppor-
tunity of shewing the pathos with which it can be described – a suspicion that has
given rise to much ridicule.’ The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 11.
47 See Smith’s representation of her illness in Letters.
48 In particular, Seward’s public conflicts with James Boswell in 1786–87 and the Benvolio
exchange (1790–94) in The Gentleman’s Magazine; Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d
Females (1798); and William Gifford’s attack on Mary Robinson and the Della Cruscans
in the Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795). See Michael Gamer and Terry F. Robinson,
‘Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback’, Studies in Romanticism, 48
(Summer 2009), 219–56 on Robinson’s transportation of her acting skills into other
arenas.
49 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell,
1783), 204.
50 See Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell:
Cornell University Press, 1997) and Jacqueline Labbe, ‘The Anthologized Romance of
Della Crusca and Anna Matilda’, Romanticism on the Net, 18 (May 2000), www.erudit.
org/revue/ron/2000/v/n18/005916ar.html (accessed 10 January 2012).
51 Review of Poems (1791) by Mrs Robinson, English Review, 19 (1792), 42–3.
52 See Tim Fulford, ‘The Electrifying Mrs. Robinson’, Women’s Writing, 9, 1 (2002), 33.
The phrase is from William Gifford’s Maeviad (1795), line 103.
53 Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols, ed. Archibald
Constable (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees,
Orme, Brown, Miller, and Murray, 1811), ii. 287, ii. 224, i. 163.
54 Cited in Barnard, Anna Seward, 128.
55 See Heather Meek, ‘Of Wandering Wombs and Wrongs of Woman: Evolving
Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason’, English Studies in Canada, 35, 2–3
(June/September 2009), 105–28.
56 Letters of Anna Seward, v. 366, v. 367.

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57 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works, 6 vols, ed. J.C.C. Mays
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), i.ii. 1230. Poems of Charlotte Smith,
8, 10, 11.
58 Ibid., ii. 216, i. 163, ii. 224, i. 163.
59 Ibid., v. 359.
60 Ibid., v. 367–9.
61 Though beyond this essay’s scope, Samuel Johnson would be another model of writing
disability worth considering.
62 Ibid., v. 371–2.
63 Ibid., v. 370–9.
64 Ibid., ii. 223.
65 Ibid., iv. 283.
66 Ibid., iii. 351.
67 Ibid., iv. 248–9.
68 Ibid., vi. 207–8.
69 Ibid., iv. 365.
70 Cited in Margaret Ashmun, The Singing Swan: An Account of Anna Seward and Her
Acquaintance with Dr. Johnson, Boswell, & Others of Their Time (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1931), 270. Scott’s presentation of Seward in the ‘Biographical
Preface’ of the Poetical Works is the main reason for her disfavour in literary history.
71 Cited in Barnard, Anna Seward, 145.
72 Ibid., 140.
73 Poetical Works of Anna Seward, with Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence, 3 vols,
ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1810), xxx.
74 Letters of Anna Seward, iii. 364.
75 Seward’s relationship with the married John Saville, which lasted almost forty years,
caused conflict with her family and provoked social censure. But Seward protected
that relationship until his death in 1803 and, in fact, assisted his wife and daughter
financially.
76 Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself, 2 vols, ed. Maria E. Robinson
(London: R. Phillips, 1801), ii. 115–16.
77 A series of Robinson’s letters was published as Original Letters of the Celebrated Mrs.
Mary Robinson in 1822 in the Lady’s Magazine; or Mirror of the Belles-Letters, Fashions,
Fine Arts, Music, Drama, & c. and republished by Sharon Setzer in Philological
Quarterly, 88, 3 (Summer 2009), 305–35, 328.
78 Robinson never speaks of Smith directly in the letters, but she did write her a laudatory
sonnet, ‘Sonnet to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, on hearing that her son was wounded at the
siege of Dunkirk’ (17 September 1793), and a footnote in Sappho and Phaon (1796)
makes clear her dislike of Smith’s illegitimate sonnet form.
79 See for example The Courier and Evening Gazette (31 December 1800): ‘For the last
twelve or thirteen years of her life, she was the martyr of a severe and incurable rheu-
matism, in consequence of which she became crippled; but this could not suppress the
fertility of her genius, or the energies of her character. Almost all her literary composi-
tions were the offspring of this period’.

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80 Setzer, ‘Original Letters’, 323. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth asks the doctor to
help Lady Macbeth rest easily: ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d/… Raze out
the written troubles of the brain’ (5.2.40–2).
81 Mary Robinson, ‘Letters’, ed. Hester Davenport, in Works of Mary Robinson, 8 vols
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), vii. 297–332.
82 Robinson, Memoirs, ii. 154–8.
83 Robinson, ‘Letters’, 318, 321.
84 Setzer, ‘Original Letters’, 320, 310.
85 Robinson, ‘Letters’, 327.
86 Ibid., 316–17.
87 Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality initiated this interpretation of Robinson’s authorial
identity, which is now the starting point for any analysis of her work.
88 Ibid., 320.
89 Ibid., 320.
90 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Introduction: Disability Studies and the
Double Bind of Representation’, in Mitchell and Snyder (eds), The Body and Physical
Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1997), 10.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jean Lutes, Tim Fulford and Michael Gamer for reading drafts of this article.
Contributor
Ashley Cross is Professor of English at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York where
she teaches courses in Romanticism, women’s literature, literary theory and writing.
Her articles on the Shelleys, Mary Robinson, Coleridge, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Dacre
and Anna Seward have been published in English Literary History, Women’s Writing,
Studies in Romanticism, MLA Approaches to Teaching and Thomson/Gale’s British Writers
Supplement. Her book, Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues
and Debts, 1784–1821 is forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto.

IP: 141.101.132.179 On: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 19:40:41

Bulletin of The John Rylands Library Volume 90 Issue 2 2014 (Doi 10.7227/bjrl.90.2.6) Cross, Ashley - Writing Pain - Sensibility and Suffering in The Late Letters of Anna Seward and Mary Robinson

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Writing Pain:

Sensibility and Suffering in the Late Letters of Anna

‘Of what species is she?’

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Though equally extreme, intense emotion worked in favour of Smith, but

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Hawkins’s theatrical language, reinforced by the setting, exhumes Robinson’s

Poetic Pain: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

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Crippling Sensibility: Rembodying the Suffering Woman Writer

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Seward’s Writing Pain: An ‘exuberance of wailful egotism’

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‘exuberance’, a word from the discourse of sensibility, however, means it is not

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Robinson’s Writing Pain: Reauthorising the Disabled Body

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denies that such a body is unproductive, unworthy of art or recognition. On 27

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