Chawton House is best known as the home of Edward Austen Knight (the younger brother of Jane Austen), who inherited the estate in 1794. The house sits on the rural outskirts of Alton, and is now a museum, garden and library focused on the study of Women’s Writing. While the house is mostly attended by Austen fans, from September 2024 to April 2025 they have dedicated an exhibition to the life of Mary Robinson. As part of my own research, I attended the exhibition on Friday 31st January 2025, just on the brink of snowdrop season. It was a quiet morning at Chawton, with myself and one other group of ladies the only folk in attendance, which made for contemplative and peaceful enjoyment of the exhibition and the grounds.
The exhibition explores the entirety of Robinson’s life, organised into ten ‘chapters’. The walls are emblazoned with statements from important figures in her life, as well as quotations taken from her posthumously published Memoirs. Each chapter provides detailed yet comprehensive descriptions of important life events, accompanied by contemporary texts to provide a historical backdrop to each landmark, including educational manuals, novels, play scripts (such as a 1744 edition of The Morals of Cicero, a text that Robinson likely would have been introduced to under her teacher Meribah Lorrington), as well as illustrations and paintings. For example, a Canaletto painting of a masquerade at Ranelagh Gardens, with guests decked out in bright costume, accompanies the chapter on Robinson’s first introductions into fashionable London society, giving visitors a clear understanding of the world into which she was immersed as a young actress. The exhibition also includes texts more directly related to Robinson, including hand-written letters from herself and her close friends and associates, as well as manuscripts and first editions of her work. Detailed signage also allows visitors to trace Robinson’s vast theatrical career (with codes and keys to indicate details of each role, including a tiny pair of trousers to specify her famous ‘breeches roles’), as well her myriad of literary pseudonyms, and the diversity of genres in which she wrote.
Through a striking black and yellow theme – quite effectively juxtaposing modern type with ornate Romantic paintings and texts – curator Emma Yandle allows visitors to follow Robinson from her birth in Bristol, to the departure of her father, her education under Hannah More and later Lorrington, her unfortunate marriage to the fraudulent Tom Robinson, through to her stage debut as Juliet under David Garrick, and on to her infamous affair with the Prince of Wales, leading to her transformation into fashion icon and sex symbol ‘Perdita’, and the subsequent degradation of her image in satirical cartoons. Beyond this, visitors witness her shift into woman of letters, marked by a significant change in how she is portrayed in portraits. The seductive, rosy-cheeked woman depicted by John Hoppner in 1792, now turns away, demurely dressed.
Visitors should bear in mind that the exhibition, inevitably, gives only limited exposure to letters and manuscripts. However, we are provided with some facsimiles of her longer texts including the 1793 poem Modern Manners and her 1799 feminist treatise A Letter to the Women of England to browse more freely.
There were two personal highlights. Firstly, a draft preserved of a letter Robinson intended to write to the Prince of Wales, after he refused to pay her the annuity he had promised when she first became his mistress. Her anger and vitriol can be vividly felt, as her writing curls around the sides of the page and drifts off into exasperated ellipses. Deciphering Robinson’s handwriting is a challenge, but one which reveals something of her personal frustrations that could not be as readily accessed in print. At the exhibition’s end, we are left with a poignant letter which Robinson’s only daughter Maria Elizabeth wrote to William Godwin after her mother’s death, requesting if he has any letters, in her words, ‘from my darling Mother – to you – which you think would do her credit?’ Whether or not Godwin responded to the letter is unclear, as no response survives. To end the exhibition with this letter is devastating—the accompanying placard reminds us that Godwin was one of only two mourners at Robinson’s funeral, a dissatisfying, lonely end to a highly public life.
For those already familiar with Robinson’s life, the exhibition is poignant and moving. For those unfamiliar, it would surely provide an absorbing introduction to one of the most scandalous yet chameleonic figures of the Romantic period.
The exhibition runs until 21st April 2025, at Chawton House, Hampshire.
Lois Linkens
Lois is a part-time PhD student at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is looking at indeterminacy of gender in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats.
Images courtesy of Lois Linkens