“One victim from the last despair”: Mary Robinson's Marie Antoinette

Abstract

This article examines Mary Robinson's response to Marie Antoinette in three texts which exhibit a deviation from the otherwise consistent defense of the French Revolution that appears in her writings. Robinson knew and admired the French Queen, and it is both personal experience and memory that define her attitude to the events in France between the years 1791 and 1793, when her concern with other, more abstract political issues is subordinated to her sympathy for, and identification with, the Queen's story. In acknowledging this foregrounded (but, for the most part, forgotten) commentary, the author hopes to recuperate these works as sites of cultural significance as well as to represent their unique place within Robinson's political writing.