(also known as Mary Duclaux)

Poet, writer.

27 February 1857 – 9 February 1944 

A tribute by Dr. Patricia Rigg

Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857-1944), known as the poet A. Mary F. Robinson, was the elder of two daughters of George Robinson and Frances Sparrow. Mary and her sister Mabel were born in Leamington Circle in Warwickshire, but the family soon moved to Manchester, where their father excelled as an architect and a journalist, and in 1872 to 84 Gower Street in Bloomsbury. They settled in as prominent members of the intellectual and cultural elite, counting as friends Edmund Gosse, William Michael and Lucy Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, Augusta Webster, Emily Pfeiffer, and Mathilde Blind. In 1881, Mary met and began a close friendship with the expatriate writer Violet Paget, already at age twenty-four a well-published and respected writer known as Vernon Lee. Mary Robinson began her career as a poet in Bloomsbury, studied at University College London, and proposed to her first husband James Darmesteter on the steps of the British Museum. The couple moved to Paris, where James died in 1894, and in 1901 Mary married Émile Duclaux, then director of the Pasteur Institute, who died in 1904. She remained in France, publishing as Mary Duclaux, but she continued to be known in England as A. Mary F. Robinson.

George and Frances Sparrow focused on their daughters’ education from the outset, providing them with a German governess to make them fluent in German and then sending them to Brussels to school for a year to ensure that they became fluent in French. When they asked to return to England, the caveat was that they attend University College London, where they enrolled in 1872, Mary first in general studies and then literature and Mabel at the Slade school of Art under Alphonse Legros. While she was studying at University College, Henry Morley awarded Mary the Ladies Educational Society certificate in May 1874, citing her as “one of two ladies who obtained the highest number of marks in the final examination.” She was an elected member of the Debating Team, and she published poetry and prose in the University Magazine. Although she left without attaining a degree when UCL began to grant degrees to women in 1878, she took with her what she needed to begin her career as a poet, biographer, essayist, and reviewer. She published her first volume of poetry A Handful of Honeysuckle in 1878, and, with her second volume in 1882, she published a scholarly translation of Euripides’s The Crowned Hippolytus, which she had begun as a student. Mary Robinson was the author of eight volumes of poetry between 1878 and 1922, as well as eight full biographies, seven of which were published first in French. She was a prolific reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement from 1902 until 1937, and the author of articles for a number of English and French journals. She published prose in English, French, and, in her early years, German, but she remained throughout her life, as Vernon Lee called her, “a born poet,” and it was as an English poet that she retained her fame even though she spent fifty years living in Paris as a French woman of letters.

Robinson attended suffrage meetings in the late 1870s, but she was never seriously engaged in the formal suffrage movement. Vernon Lee’s characterization of her poetic presence is clear in a satirical Punch cartoon in 1885, which depicts Robinson in the British Museum reading from A Handful of Honeysuckle, the only woman in a group of men clearly enjoying not only the poetry but also the beautiful woman reading the poetry. However, Mary Robinson was a serious woman, who pushed back against what she called her father’s “Tory principles,” asking for financial help in publishing her first book of poetry in lieu of a coming out ball and requesting and receiving permission to teach at the Working Women’s College, which was at the time affiliated with University College London. In April 1878, concurrent with the publication of A Handful of Honeysuckle, Mary Robinson began teaching at the Working Women’s College. While she welcomed the opportunity to perform this social role, she found teaching literature to young working women who came to her classes without formal preparation challenging. Although she worked for hours each week to deliver lectures that were meant to be accessible to young women from a working-class background, she often feared that she missed her target and that no one understood what she was trying to convey. Nevertheless, she persevered and was still teaching in 1882, when she took Vernon Lee along to a class, and Lee was impressed by the ways in which Robinson was able to use literature to enhance the lives of working-class women. 

Although the decade that Mary Robinson spent in Bloomsbury was a relatively brief period in a long life, these were the transformative years of a woman who is today recognised as an important figure in English poetry and in French letters. It was during her years in Bloomsbury that she realised her aestheticist sympathies that foreshadowed her prominence in the Anglo-French community of the Fin-de-Siècle. She was a physically attractive woman who never lost her personal appeal and who used this appeal not only to draw the literary elite to her salons in both London and Paris but also to provide a welcoming space for shy members of the salon society to engage in conversation. During her years in Bloomsbury, she developed the determination and conviction that would lead her to alienate friends and family when she felt it necessary: she defied her parents to marry the Jewish and congenitally ill James Darmesteter, supported Dreyfus when some of her closest friends were unwilling to believe in his innocence, and encouraged bravery and patriotism during the First World War, when Vernon Lee and her circle were pacificists. A. Mary F. Robinson is buried in France as Mary Duclaux, but she remains today one of the many prolific British women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that effected the literary transition from Victorianism to modernism.

Patricia Rigg is Professor Emerita at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She has published books on Robert Browning and Augusta Webster, as well as A. Mary F. Robinson: Victorian Poet and French Woman of Letters, published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2021. 

Neurasthenia

Read here by Julia Pascal

I watch the happier people of the house
Come in and out, and talk, and go their ways;
I sit and gaze at them; I cannot rouse
My heavy mind to share their busy days.

I watch them glide, like skaters on a stream,
Across the brilliant surface of the world.
But I am underneath: they do not dream
How deep below the eddying flood is whirl’d.

They cannot come to me, nor I to them;
But, if a mightier arm could reach and save,
Should I forget the tide I had to stem?
Should I, like these, ignore the abysmal wave?

Yes! in the radiant air how could I know
How black it is, how fast it is, below?