Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson [Hardcover]

Paula Byrne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2005

This thoroughly engaging and richly researched book presents a compelling portrait of Mary Robinson–darling of the London stage, mistress to the most powerful men in England, feminist thinker, and bestselling author, described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a woman of undoubted genius.”

One of the most flamboyant free spirits of the late eighteenth century, Mary Robinson led a life that was marked by reversals of fortune. After being abandoned by her merchant father, who left England to establish a fishery among the Canadian Eskimos, Mary was married, at age fifteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipation landed the couple and their baby in debtors’ prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry, gaining her the patronage of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

On her release, Mary rose to become one of the London theater’s most alluring actresses, famously playing Perdita in The Winter’s Tale for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. Never one to pass up an opportunity, she later used his ardent and numerous love letters as blackmail. After being struck down by paralysis, apparently following a miscarriage, she remade herself yet again, this time as a popular writer who was also admired by the leading intellectuals of the day.

Filled with triumph and despair, and then triumph again, the amazing, multifaceted life of “Perdita” is marvelously captured in this stunning biography.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A remarkable woman and an exceptional biography.”
–Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

“A fascinating, page-turning, and probably definitive biography of this intriguing woman.”
–Emma Donoghue, author of Life Mask and Slammerkin

“Like her sometime patron, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, brilliant Mary Robinson flared like a comet through late eighteenth-century England’s elite society. Literary sleuth Paula Byrne has ransacked archives across the world to piece together the most complete account to date of this fascinating woman. Perdita is an absorbing study in chiaroscuro of a woman too beautiful and too complex for even Reynolds and Gainsborough to capture on canvas.”
–Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale

“We seem to have an insatiable appetite for biographies of eighteenth century women. . . . A superbly researched and narrated life of a woman whose capacity for self-transformation, when combined with beauty, talent, wit, and passion suggest that she may be the most interesting of them all . . . a fine biographer has conjured up a dazzling personality and brought her, laughing, back to life.”
–Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times (London)

“A work of genuine scholarship . . . a masterly portrait of a remarkable woman.”
–Sunday Telegraph (London)

About the Author

PAULA BYRNE has a Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool, where she is a research fellow in English literature. A regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, she lives in Warwickshire with her two young children and her husband, the critic and biographer Jonathan Bate. Perdita is her first book to be published in the U.S.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Random House (March 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400061482
• ISBN-13: 978-1400061488
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #763,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #42 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Theatre

More About the Author

Paula was born in Birkenhead in 1967, the third daughter in a large working-class Catholic family. She studied English and Theology at the college that is now Chichester University and then taught English and Drama at Wirral Grammar School for Boys and Wirral Metropolitan College. She then completed her MA and PhD in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is now a full-time writer, living with her husband, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, and their three young children (Tom, Ellie and Harry) in an old farmhouse in a South Warwickshire village near Stratford-upon-Avon.

Paula is represented by The Wylie Agency. She is an Executive Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Warwick.

Paula is the author of the top ten bestseller Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (HarperCollins UK, Random House USA). A selection for the 2005 Richard and Judy Book Club and a British Book Awards 'Best Read' nomination, Perdita was also long-listed for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize. It tells the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary 'Perdita' Robinson (1757-1800).

Paula's first book, shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize, was Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002 and reissued in paperback in 2007 by Hambledon Continuum. Paul Johnson of The Spectator chose it as his best-ever book on Jane Austen and the Times Literary Supplement described as a 'definitive and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austen's art.' She has also edited a Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Jane Austen's Emma.

Paula has published essays on a wide range of women authors, reviews for the Sunday Telegraph and the TLS, and in her new book tells the story of Evelyn Waugh's friendship with the extraordinary aristocratic family who inspired Brideshead Revisited. Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead is published worldwide by HarperCollins, with the UK edition out in August 2009 and the USA edition forthcoming in early March 2010.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent biography of an outstanding woman. BUY IT !, April 20, 2005

By 

M. J. Holland (England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (Paperback)

I'll confess I would never have looked at this book if it hadn't been for the fact that I decided to read the 10 nominations for Richard and Judy's Best Read 2005.This book has been the biggest surprise of the lot,because, to be honest, I was not really looking forward to it.
How wrong could I be ? This is a dazzling story of a fascinating woman. I am afraid to say the other biography in the Richard and Judy list,"Feel" by Chris Heath, which is all about pop singer Robbie Williams, comes off a very poor second when compared to this volume. Sadly of course there's no doubt which book will sell more.I wish all Robbie Williams fans, or indeed the fans of any of the over-hyped celebrities of today, would read this book and find out that maybe their hero's or heroine's exploits are not so special after all when compared to what the subject of this biography got up to.
Mary Robinson, whose nickname was Perdita, was married at 15 and her marriage was something of a disaster and included spending some time in prison with her husband. She then made herself into one of London's most celebrated actresses and was a friend of the outstanding theatrical figures of the day.She became a leading figure in the glamorous high society of the city, reputedly being the most beautiful woman in Britain.She voluntarily gave up her theatrical career to become the mistress of the Prince of Wales, thus heightening her celebrity even further. Reading about this time of her life it appears that she was just as famous or infamous as any contemporary celebrity.Maybe more so.There are many obvious similarities.
In the second half of the book the plot changes almost completely as Mary, after being ditched by her royal lover, re-invents herself as a writer. She is so successful in this enterprise that she becomes one of the leading lady literary figures of the era. She is primarily a poetess, but also writes plays, novels and political tracts and she becomes friendly with both leading political and cultural figures.
It is an absolutely fascinating tale, made more moving perhaps by the fact that she was not lucky in love, suffered a debilitating illness for many years and finally died young at the age of 43.
All this is retold in an easy and entertaining way by Paula Byrne and I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must for lovers of Regency history and this period, July 23, 2005

By 

A. Woodley "Patroness, Janeites, the Austen list" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (Hardcover)

For those who enjoy the Regency period and life of George IV, this is one of the most perfect books to introduce you into the life of the period. It was a brief, intense and fascinating life which pushed the established mores to their limits.

The Prince of Wales (lat to be George IV) became enamoured of Mary Robinson in her portrayal of Peridita in Shakespeare's, A Winter's Tale. She was a young actress, escaped from a bad marriage and strange father. She took to the stage for some income (as many women of the period did instead of taking up prostitution as such)

The Prince of Wales became known as Florizel to Robinson's Perdita and she was his first 'major' mistress. Their lives intertwined for a brief period in his early adulthood - the beginning of what is known as the 'extended regency'. Robinson was then mistress to many of the influential peers of the time, and was even friends with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire;

At a time when Georgian morals were of questionable value (everything in private, nothing in public)- when profligacy, spending, appearance and general splendour were the order of the day - Mary Robinson orbited on at the perimetre of acceptability. An actress, an abadoned wife, a mistress, and more.

I found this book overlong, but worth the effort to read. It is one of a series of books about women on the edge of society in this period, and has been great to build up a picture of life and living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The author has gone to enormous efforts to track down information on Robinson, and it has paid off. There seems to be a good depth of research to back up the work. Overall a good read and well worth making the effort

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating transformation, October 3, 2007

By 

Wandering Colorado Girl (Virginia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (Paperback)

The late 18th Century is a fascinating period of contradiction. The circumspect lives of George III and his wife are at odds at the so-called crème de la crème of society, including the Prince of Wales. Mary Robinson's life story reveals the opulent lifestyles, decadence, and life of privilege of England's aristocracy and nobles. A great commentary on this period.