Customer Reviews

All For Love: The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

All too often, when a novelist comes up with a character that does outrageous things, or seems to be in the prominent spots, or knowing the famous over and over again, the author gets accussed of going far too over the top and being unrealistic. But sometimes, every now and then, such a person does appear in history.

Author Amanda Elyot tells the story of a woman who grew up in near poverty and turned herself into a celebrity in late eighteenth century England. Mary Darby is the cherished child of a wealthy merchant, with a father that adores her, a mother who watches closely over her and two brothers. It's clear from the opening that Mary has everything that she needs, including a very rare education. And she is blessed with exceptional prettiness and a gift for mimicry and acting. But her love isn't enough to keep her father home. Mr. Darby is returning to his adventures in the Americas, and tells his wife bluntly that he considers their marriage over. He'll send some money, but the rest will be up to her, and he walks out of their lives.

It's a devastating blow to the little family. Their fine possessions are stripped away and sold, leaving them destitute and relocating to the City of London. Mary is able to meet several people, and her attention is ever drawn to performing on stage -- right up until the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, Mr. Garrick, asks her to audition for him. When the audition turns out to be a success, and the manager agrees to train her up for the stage, Mary is delighted.

Not only will she have a career of her own, but she will have her own income as well. It's a lure that Mary can not resist, but her mother is less than pleased about her daughter's choice. An actress in 1770's London has a bad reputation, for if she can display herself on stage, no doubt she'll be displaying herself for gentlemen clients, and not be much more than the prostitutes in the upper stalls of the theatre. To keep her daughter out of such a terrible fate, Mrs. Darby comes up with another plan.

A young lawyer in training has become very smitten with Mary, and he's young, good looking, and has a career choice that promises a stable future. Better yet, he's the sole heir to his uncle, a wealthy landowner in Wales. Mary's not too pleased at being married off, but the lure of riches and high society is too much, and she is gradually pushed into the scheme, and finds herself Mrs. Thomas Robinson at the tender age of fifteen.

But high living comes with a price, and an expensive one. her young husband is more than happy to run up huge debts, and Mary, overwhelmed by grand living realizes a bit too late what the cost will be. Worst still, Mary finds out that her husband is the sort that strays, enjoying drink and gambling far too much to ever really be concentrating on earning a living. And his so-called friends are more interested in seducing Mary than trying to help Thomas back into any sort of sobriety. The debts pile up, and soon Mary and her husband are on the run from the bailiffs to avoid debtor's prison, and Mary is very pregnant.

Soon they are back in London, with Mary and the infant sharing Mr. Robinson's difficulties in prison. It's a grim situation, and Mary, quickly loosing any faith that her husband will ever be faithful to her, decides that she has to take things into her own hands, and once again seeks to become an actress. As she isn't responsible for her husband's debts, she can leave the prison. And very quickly she finds herself a darling of the theatre crowd. Even more unusually, she meets the Duchess of Devonshire, who admires Mary's poetry, and helps to launch her second career as a writer.

Quickly enough, Mary is able to support herself and her daughter, with the unfortunate husband at her door, taking whatever earnings that he can to spend on his gambling and women. And despite a great many offers from various gentlemen, Mary refuses to take on the role of a man's mistress. Despite everything, she is determined to remain faithful to her husband.

That is, until the Prince of Wales, heir to King George III, takes interest in her, and in his young heart, declares undying love to his 'Perdita,' the name that Mary became better known as...

It's quite a tale, going from rags to riches to love and abandonment, over and over again. For Mary longs to fall in love, but that elusive security always seems to vanish just as it's nearly in her grasp. And she keeps struggling to survive with her daughter, turning to acting and writing to support them both, despite having to cope with a crippling illness.

While a great deal of the story would seem to improbable, but the story of Mary Robinson is quite true. Many of her works survived to this day, including the memoirs that she wrote at the close of her life, and what Amanda Elyot based most of her novel on. Told in first person, it's a lively excursion through Georgian London, filled with plenty of witty talk, details of daily living and especially clothing, and quite a few insights into Mary's own plight and that of women as well.

That's the other major theme of this book, and sadly, it doesn't work quite as well. The reader is reminded continually that men of this time were perfidious louts, using their wives as not much more than breeding stock or a bank account. Even the two great loves of Mary's life are not much to admire for their actions -- the Prince of Wales (who would eventually become King George IV) treats Mary shabbily, demanding fidelity of her and that she give up the stage, but also won't cover the very expensive costs of her being his mistress, and Banastre Tarleton, a war hero from the Americas, fights, cheats, gambles and never quite declares that he actually loves Mary.

And Mary? Instead of showing both of these 'gentlemen' to the door, instead pines away, and hopes that they will finally turn and be faithful to her. It's this that ultimately ruined the book for me -- I so wanted to see her develope some kind of backbone and give these men a good kick of the backside before slamming the door. Instead -- she submits to fate, writes her novels and poetry, and even manages an early form of feminism.

I was hoping for something more, but this breezy, chatty, gossipy novel really didn't rise to the mark. That's too bad, as it could have been much more in the hands of the author. Only recommended to those very interested in either the subject of the novel, or the times that the story is set in.

An author's afterword gives some more background and details about Mary's life. There is also a reader's guide for book clubs, with a few interesting questions, but nothing really insightful either.

It's an average, historical read. Three stars overall.

Mary Darby Robinson was nothing less than famous - first for her acting, then for her affairs, and lastly for her prolific writing. However, as a feminist and history lover with a penchant for the Ton, I found "All for Love" to be a somewhat dull novel for a book based on a life so fascinating. The author's note at the end helped to explain some of my complaints (ie: the reason for some outlandish scenes), but finding this at the end of the book was too late to alter my reading experience.

Mary's life was marked at a young age when her father abandoned her family and left her mother bereft; it was the first time of many that the men Mary loved would desert her and leave her in the lurch. She escaped her depressing reality by delving into her education, and found she was able to express her anguish through poetry and eventually dramatic roles, a pattern she would sustain through her life.

Overall, Mary's early years are explained in detail, yet they are not particularly fascinating. Her affair with the Prince seems comparatively lacking in detail, particularly since it is highlighted in the title of the book. The last third of the book seems torn between chronicling her tumultuous 15 year affair with Banastre Tarleton and highlighting her rise to literary fame. Though Ban's treatment of Mary was the impetus for her many works, neither subject is fully developed enough to be satisfying to the reader. The culmination of this book, and thus her life as it is told to the reader, comes across as rushed and lacking in depth. I wanted more romance, more character development and more overall depth than I got. Though the book is easy to read, I found it lacked the hook to draw me into Georgian high society that I had hoped for and which other novels about the same era have provided.

The Georgian age is full of larger than life characters, many who are mentioned in this book, and about whom many other good books have been written. For non-fictional insight I recommend the biography "Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire" by Amanda Foreman. A wonderful novel based on the life of Mary Robinson's rival on stage, Eliza Ferren, and which will bring the reader much closer to Sheridan and Fox is "Life Mask" by Emma Donoghue. Diane Haeger's "The Secret Wife of George IV" catches up with the Prince of Wales later in life and showcases his compulsiveness. Finally, "Vindication" by Frances Sherwood is a novel based on the life of Mary Wollenstonecraft with depth, emotion and vigor.

Mary Robinson's life almost begs to be written about. Her father abandoned her mother and her brothers when she was young, she was married at 15 years to another faithless man and spent time in debtor's prison with him, she started writing poetry for herself and to make some income and later went on to become a successful actress meeting such stage luminaries as Garrick and Sheridan, played Perdita in Garrick's version of Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" and the young Prince of Wales (the future George IV) was smitten with her--he became her "Florizel" and she his first Mistress, and that was all before she reached her 23rd birthday. Mary Robinson was one of the great beauties of her day, painted by Gainsborough, Romney and Reynolds. The Duchess of Devonshire was one of her earliest patrons. She grew into a literary figure, writing poetry, plays and novels. People from the military, politics, art, literature and society all have a place in her incredible life.

This novelized re-telling of Mary Robinson's life is fairly quick-paced and easy to read, accordingly. Facts seem to follow closely what has been documented, although the author says in the Afterword that she also included some events that were clearly fictionalized but by Mary Robinson herself in her memoirs. There is so much that is known about the events in Mary Robinson's life that sometimes this tale seems too superficial. I'm not sure I really got a good grasp of Mary's character, and all the many people she comes in contact with during her tumultuous life are even more briefly sketched--even her famous lovers. Mary's voice does seem to come through authentically, however, and the feel for the period and the events is good. The author is successful in relating the many details of this extraordinary life in well-paced and exciting manner.

I knew precisly squat about Mary Robinson before I picked up this book, except from what the back blurb told me. I was hoping for a tale of the theater with a feisty heroine I could root for and sympathize with. Unfortunately, the theater world, when it does appear, is given life with a lackluster pen. Since Mary Robinson's stage career was brief anyway, it would have been nice to make the most of it when it did happen. Sheridan and Garrick appear, but they are just names and there is really nothing to them beyond what one would find in a Wikipedia entry. In fact, Garrick is treated somewhat curiously. In Chapter 15, Garrick is alive. In Chapter 16, Mary referrs to "the ghost of my dear mentor Garrick." I had to wiki if Garrick had died in that time. (He had.) Then, nearly 30 pages later, we get a more in-depth description of Garrick's illness and death. It was quite a "wires flapping" moment in the narrative structure, given Garrick's stated importance in her life by Mary herself.

As for the feisty heroine, she was not to be seen. For someone touted as a front-line Romantic poetess and mover and shaker, she was suprisingly drab and a pawn in the hands of many: her mother, husband, and the two loves of her life, the Prince of Wales and Banastre Tarleton. If Mary Robinson was truly such a manipulated and desperate doormat, I doubt any author could make her into an engaging focus of a book. If Ms. Elyot deliberately emphasized that aspect in order to create a romantically suffering character at the hands of those utterly unworthy of her, then it misfired. The last 150 pages became an aggravating trial as nearly every moment of Mary's and Tarleton's affair was described, each low point bringing out the same descriptions of pathetic loss and abandonment, each reunion the same descriptions of euphoric joy and renewed validation. All that was missing were the blank pages from "New Moon" to illustrate Bella's non-personhood without the presence of Edward. Even when Tarleton is physically absent, Mary furiously writes poems for publication, jealous screeds to communicate with him her displeasure that he is not by her side. He is the alpha and omega of her very being and she considers herself worthless without him.

The bulk of the novel is light, chatty, and shallow - as it is from Mary's first person POV, that is no surprise - but the descriptions of clothes and carriages grow tiresome, and often I was left with the feeling that there was no "there" there. When the focus turns away from her livery and wardrobe, we are instructed by the author to believe that Mary had a great mind and valued intellect, but then Mary makes a stalkerish fool of herself over and over with men who violate her principles about adultery/abandonment and are addicted to gambling (a vice she hates above all others.) She doesn't even profess a desire to change them. She only enables because she loves. For all her experience with poverty/prison/hardship, she learns NOTHING. It was not fun to read about a woman who keeps banging her head against a wall and wonders why it hurts.

She makes a fetish out of marital obedience as she hauls her husband's butt out of the fire by scrimping to pay his debts, then repeats it all over again with Tarleton when she becomes his slave in all but name. She justifies it to herself, but such willful stupidity makes a modern reader want to wash their hands of her and her self-inflicted plight. No amount of wildly mushy poetry can redeem her for the utter fool she is, and unless the author really digs deep into a character's psyche, there's small chance of it making a good story.

This probing Elyot does not do, Mary's father's abandonment of his family hardly making a connection to her desperate drive for love and acceptance. The connection is there and plain to see, but Elyot doesn't connect the wires because the scope is limited to Mary's idiotic perspective, and she could not see anything unless she tripped over it. And maybe not even then. She would only moan that Tarleton wasn't there to pick her up and then drag herself to her desk to write a verse that he return immediately.

Another part of the book - rather, Elyot's style - that irked me was the clumsy insertion of information that peppered the narrative and the dialogue. For example, Tarleton has just rejoined her (yet again) after Mary has felt abandoned (yet again). He whisks her off to the boudoir and is about to do the whole "Out It Comes And In It Goes" that drives Mary wild with ecstasy every time as they lay on top of each other in a tangle of clothes and limbs. Then he huskily murmurs against her ear:

"Once I read 'Bounding Billows,' in the August issue of The Oracle, I could not bear the thought of spending another moment without you."

Ravish me, Mr. Footnote!

And that isn't the only example I can point to, but this review is getting long enough. There are many instances of such weirdly specific citations popping up in dialogue, and sometime vast swathes of it land like anvils, as if the author just put on her schoolmarm glasses and was reading to the class. Why Elyot didn't take her research and make a non-fiction book instead of a frothy romance, I have no idea. It would have made for a better read, as the romance part of this book is overwritten in a purply manner, and the remainder turns the main characters into clinging idiots and crass villains in a vicious cycle of codependency.

Despite all this, the book was an easy read (except for the slog of the last 150 pages), but at the end I had the feeling that I had just crossed the mighty Mississippi...if it were 2 inches deep. Easy, undoubtedly! But boringly so, and my sense of accomplishment was riding on nil. It was a small investment of time to discover an author and subject that I would rather not read again. I would have given it 3 stars, if not for the utter decline of the last third. So 2 it is.

The experience has made me want to re-read "Wicked Company" by Ciji Ware. It has been years, but I recall the heroine being very admirable, the theatrical details superb, Garrick and Sheridan utterly given their due, and the tone of the story more coherent. Here's hoping memory serves.

The author does not successfully recreate the "voice" of Mary Robinson, and makes clumsy vocabulary errors--using "enervated" when she means "nervous" or "energized"; saying that Mary's husband's plight "softened my compassion"--say what? This was a disappointing read. There are also irritating historical "footnotes" inserted which are too numerous to mention and which are covered better in another negative review. The author also repeats her phrasing, sometimes within a few paragraphs, and inserts 20th-century language such as "double standard." A very shallow historical romance with emphasis on "romance" (and clothing) as opposed to "history." If your usual fare is Harlequin or Rosemary Rogers, this is dumbed-down enough for you.

This arrived really quickly! Can't wait to read another Amanda Elyot book! Read By a Lady also by her!

Mary Darby was born in 1758 to an affluent merchant who not long afterward abandoned his family. Mary received an education especially in the fine arts and at fifteen planned to perform on stage shortly. However, her mother persuaded her to marry Tom Robinson, the heir of a rich uncle. He proved the second disappointing male in her life; others followed as she seemed to find a lifetime of losers although she hid her disappointment inside her poetry. Ultimately Tom's wastrel ways led to Mary going on stage where the Prince of Wales saw her and made her his.

Mary Robinson's words from her poetry, essays and letters enhance this delightful historical biographical fiction. Amanda Elyot pays homage to the royal mistress while allowing the audience to understand the motivators of her life, which in turn spotlights the limited options women had during the latter half of the eighteenth century even in relatively enlightened England. Regency romance readers will appreciate The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson.

Harriet Klausner

This novel was a waste of money and time. After reading the embarrassing tirade of counter-reviews the sick and sad psychotic author has had to offer, I am unsurprised as to the level of defensiveness present... for the author has sound reasons behind her insecurity.

Do yourself a favor and don't entertain the thought of this novel or any other novel by Leslie Carroll. I wish I hadn't.

This reminds me of the good old days of Masterpiece Theatre (way more years ago than I would like to admit to wathing it) when there was a delightful mix of period/ historical accuracy and a nice juicy plot (Upstairs/ Downstairs of course, and does anyone remember the fantastic "Duchess of Duke Street?"). One feels the sense of the sumptuous period garb and the sexual tension just about bursts from the corsets in what I would classify as "speculative historical fiction"-enough research to keep it grounded in reality with enough of a good yarn-spinners spark to fill in the blanks where history left a mystery. I am positively aching to see a dramatic adaptation; there's probably enough sweep and plot here for a miniseries. Highly reccomended for lovers of historical romance, especially if you like a bit of spice in your oh-so-proper British cup of tea!