Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic
by Sarah Gristwood
409pp, Bantam, £20
Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson
by Paula Byrne
480pp, HarperCollins, £20
After a century of silence, three competing lives of the 18th-century actress, courtesan and writer Mary Robinson have arrived (Hester Davenport's The Prince's Mistress was published recently by Sutton). For Robinson, such a deluge of publicity would fail to raise an eyebrow; dubbed "the most beautiful woman in England", her every movement was documented in the press, her image plastered everywhere, she read her own obituary 14 years before she was due to meet her maker and her Memoirs had to contend for the truth with a fictitious, salacious memoir written in her name.
When it was unheard of for a middle-class woman to be celebrated for anything, Robinson achieved celebrity in three separate spheres, giving her life not a single peak of success but a series of separate summits. She was famous first as a Drury Lane actress, trained and supported by the luminaries of the day, Garrick and Sheridan. During a performance of The Winter's Tale, Robinson caught the eye of the juvenile Prince of Wales (who, aged 17, was three years younger than our own Prince Harry), after which she had the dubious honour of being his first mistress - the notorious "Perdita" to his "Florizel". Although the titles of Sarah Gristwood's and Paula Byrne's books commemorate this brief period in Robinson's life, they each recognise that the affair with Florizel was one of the least significant of Perdita's achievements, its importance lying in the pressure the prince exerted on the actress to give up the stage (which, reluctantly, she did) and the pressure she then put on him to compensate her with a lifetime's annuity (which, reluctantly, he did).
After she was abandoned by HRH and her own feckless husband disappeared, Robinson was kept by the Whig politician Charles James Fox, for whom she campaigned. She then settled into a tempestuous, 15-year relationship with Colonel Banastre Tarleton, a celebrity-soldier who, according to Gristwood, "gave muscle to her glitzy, slightly showbiz fame". "One yearns to say," writes Gristwood, that the couple were "the Posh and Becks of their day". While pursuing Tarleton on a coach to Dover, Robinson was struck down with the mysterious condition - which both biographers agree to be a violent attack of rheumatoid arthritis - which rendered her immobile. Not yet 30, for the last decade of her life Robinson had to be lifted, wheeled and carried everywhere. It was then that she became a writer - and a very successful one - of novels, political tracts, essays, plays, and reams and reams of poetry. The former show-girl now mixed with the intellectual heavyweights of the day, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Coleridge (who, Gristwood argues, was terrified of the older woman's evident sexuality and transgressive past).
Gristwood's Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic and Byrne's Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson might be regarded as the literary equivalents of the famous Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits of Robinson, both painted in 1782. Gainsborough's lush and languorous study of beauty recently scorned by royalty was thought good to look at but not a good likeness, while Reynolds's cool, grave, urban seductress is considered to have captured more Robinson's remarkable strength. Gristwood, like Gainsborough, understands the business of image control. Writing about Robinson, she focuses on the peculiarities of the public persona, recognising the same quality she found when, as a journalist, she wrote about modern celebrity; that "odd blend of wariness and avidity with which she regarded any attempt to know her". Her Robinson is, she argues, a prototype of Madonna, a "media baby", a mercurial, material girl who "spent most of her life in a state of fame", and were she to make a programme on Robinson, Gristwood writes, she would want to interview Max Clifford. Byrne's Robinson is the more stable and cerebral figure, "a thinking woman of real genius". She may have been sexually transgressive and a fashion icon, but it was as "a novelist, satirist and social commentator that Mary's true talents lay".
While Gristwood is good on context, particularly the French revolution and the social position of courtesans, Byrne has done more extensive research and has the edge on the killing detail. Her major scoop is finding the original manuscript of Robinson's Memoirs , which reveals subtle, telling differences from the published version. Byrne has a grasp of the 18th-century stage which Gristwood, who is more interested in analogies with 20th-century show-business, does not; the strongest pages of Byrne's excellent biography are those which describe Robinson's years at Drury Lane. The early period of Robinson's life is also more detailed in Byrne; she argues convincingly that Perdita was involved with the money lender "Jew King" before her liaison with the prince, as well as being the mistress of the royal best friend, Lord Malden.
Both biographies argue that Robinson's place in romanticism has been apallingly erased, but while Byrne is a scholar of romanticism, Gristwood is a student. Byrne writes about the literary scene of the 1790s with authority while Gristwood leans on other authorities (Janet Todd, Richard Holmes, Tim Fulford) to validate her points. Both write about Robinson's opium-dream poem, "The Maniac", dictated to her daughter, but it is Byrne who makes the stronger case for Robinson's being the precursor of the romantic tradition of opium-inspired writing. Gristwood, for her part, writes of the origins of Coleridge's trance-like "Christabel" that it would be "too facile a temptation for the biographer of Mary Robinson to suggest that the combination of guilt and guiltlessness Coleridge perceived in [Robinson] provided the poem's inspiration", but she suggests it none the less.
Of these very different books, each a fascinating and stimulating portrait, Gristwood's might be described as the "racier" and Byrne's as the weightier. Byrne has had the good fortune of a Richard & Judy nomination, so will undoubtedly be the more widely read. But as the many paintings of Mary Robinson show, she lent herself readily to more than one perspective.
· Frances Wilson's The Courtesan's Revenge is published by Faber.
