image id: ps_cps_cd3_046
W. Dickinson, after Sir Joshua Reynolds (1721–1792)
[Mary Robinson]
Stipple engraving
London, 1785
NYPL, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Mary Robinson: “I never knew
a human being with so full a mind—bad, good, and indifferent, I grant
you, but full and overflowing.” He was only one of her circle of literary
friends, which also included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick,
John Wolcott, and the novelist Jane Porter, among others. Toward the end of
her life Robinson depended wholly on her writing for support, but at the beginning
of her career, when Reynolds painted her, she was famous as an actress and
for her brief stint as mistress to the Prince of Wales.
