The Many Lives of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs

In this essay I survey editions of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs through the nineteenth century, tracking their commercial appeal alongside key developments in the book trades. In so doing, I investigate the bibliographical, book-historical phenomena that accomplished what Clifford Siskin calls “The Great Forgetting” of women writers after the Romantic period. Reprintings of Robinson’s Memoirs encouraged Robinson’s literary obscurity by staging her personal notoriety. Edmund Blunden’s 1930 edition of the Memoirs proves an exception to this rule. To the degree that its bibliographic codes return to those of the first printed edition, Blunden restores materially Robinson’s place within Romantic print culture.