Finding a solvent husband for Mary became her mother's priority. The only daughter of a prosperous merchant, she was unusually well educated for a girl at that time but before she reached her teens, her father disappeared to Canada with his mistress and spent all the family's money. Mary was born in Bristol in 1757 or 1758 (the vagueness is typical of her she managed her image carefully). 'She knew how to handle the media, she lived in the world of celebrity but she was an acute and comic analyst of that world.' 'She fashioned her own image,' writes Byrne. Society in the late-18th century was just as preoccupied with public figures as it is today and Mary knew how to manipulate the scandal sheets. Without playing down Mary's scandalous sex life, Byrne focuses on her standing as a woman of letters, the 'English Sappho'. After being struck down by paralysis, apparently following a miscarriage, she remade herself yet again, this time as a popular writer who was also admired by the leading intellectuals of the day.įilled with triumph and despair, and then triumph again, the amazing, multifaceted life of “Perdita” is marvelously captured in this stunning biography.A forthcoming volume, The Prince's Mistress by Hester Davenport, concentrates on her role as the lover of the Prince of Wales but with Perdita, Paula Byrne gives us a full-scale literary biography. Never one to pass up an opportunity, she later used his ardent and numerous love letters as blackmail. On her release, Mary rose to become one of the London theater’s most alluring actresses, famously playing Perdita in The Winter’s Tale for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. His dissipation landed the couple and their baby in debtors’ prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry, gaining her the patronage of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. After being abandoned by her merchant father, who left England to establish a fishery among the Canadian Eskimos, Mary was married, at age fifteen, to Thomas Robinson. One of the most flamboyant free spirits of the late eighteenth century, Mary Robinson led a life that was marked by reversals of fortune. Synopsis: This thoroughly engaging and richly researched book presents a compelling portrait of Mary Robinson–darling of the London stage, mistress to the most powerful men in England, feminist thinker, and bestselling author, described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a woman of undoubted genius.”

Perdita by Paula Byrne