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First Irish Edition. In Two Volumes (complete Set). Octavo (12 cm x 17,5 cm). 336, 322 pages. Hardcover / Modern half-leather bound to the style of the 18th-century with spinelabels. Both Volumes in protective Mylar and now housed in a bespoke Solander Box. Very good condition with some minor signs of wear only to the edges and two tiny lesions to the titlepage of the first Volume. Faded dampstain to some pages of the lower bookblock of Volume II. While the bookblock is generally used and has the occasional very faint stain and a minor tear to a page, the set is in very good or even better condition ! Extremely scarce ! [This first Dublin Edition in two Volumes is not known by Montague Summers. In his "A Gothic Bibliography", he lists only the First Edition by Longman in 1798 and the Second Edition from Minerva-Press in 1805]. Mary Robinson s fifth novel, "Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature", was [First] published by T.N. Longman in 1797. Like her other novels, Walsingham addresses many political themes, such as women s rights to inheritance, the value of personal merit over rank, and the importance of education for both sexes. In addition, Walsingham makes strong social critiques, particularly about socially-prescribed class and gender roles and about the dangers of excessive sensibility. The novel is also notable because of its generic mixing: poetry that is essential to the story s development is interspersed throughout, and Robinson published these poems separately in newspaper poetry columns to popular and critical acclaim. (Source: LE - Literary Encyclopedia). Mary Robinson (née Darby; 27 November 1757 26 December 1800) was an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived in France and Germany for a time. She enjoyed poetry from the age of seven and started working, first as a teacher and then as actress, from the age of fourteen. She wrote many plays, poems and novels. She was a celebrity, gossiped about in newspapers, famous for her acting and writing. During her lifetime she was known as "the English Sappho". She earned her nickname "Perdita" for her role as Perdita (heroine of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale) in 1779. She was the first public mistress of King George IV while he was still Prince of Wales. In 1792 Robinson published her most popular novel which was a Gothic novel titled, Vancenza; or The Dangers of Credulity. The books were "sold out by lunch time on the first day and five more editions quickly followed, making it one of the top-selling novels in the latter part of the eighteenth century." It did not receive either critical or popular acclaim. In 1794 she wrote The Widow; or, A Picture of Modern Times which portrayed themes of manners in the fashionable world. Since Robinson was a fashion icon and very much involved in the fashion world the novel did not get a lot of favourable reception in 1794 as it might have now. In 1796 she wrote Angelina: A Novel. It cost more money than it brought in. Through this novel, she offers her thoughts on the afterlife of her literary career. After years of scholarly neglect, Robinson's literary afterlife continues apace. While most of the early literature written about Robinson focused on her sexuality, emphasising her affairs and fashions, she also spoke out about woman's place in the literary world, for which she began to receive the attention of feminists and literary scholars in the 1990s. Robinson recognised that, "women writers were deeply ambivalent about the myths of authorship their male counterparts had created" and as a result she sought to elevate woman's place in the literary world by recognising women writers in her own work. In A Letter to the Women of England, Robinson includes an entire page dedicated to English women writers to support her notion that they were just as capable as men of being successful in the literary world. These ideas have continued to.
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