Abstract
This chapter re-reads a celebrated and contested life from Romantic-era public life. In the summer of 1783, while still in her mid-twenties, the former actress and royal courtesan Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson began to suffer from progressive lower-limb paralysis. Brewer examines the contemporary reception of Robinson’s impairment within the context of the Romantic-era debate about how disability should be responded to and interpreted. Robinson’s obituary and other sympathetic postmortem accounts offer redemptive narratives in which Robinson’s immobility, physical and mental sufferings, stoicism, and literary achievements expiate her scandalous life. Brewer argues that Robinson understood disability as a social construction: she regarded herself as abled as long as her financial resources and care-givers permitted her to have a social life, write prolifically, and visit London’s cultural sites. According to the posthumous and not entirely reliable ‘Continuation’ of The Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson (1801), her paralysis motivated her to embark on an astoundingly productive literary career. Physical disability inspired compositional hyperability.
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Brewer, W.D. (2016). Mary Robinson’s Paralysis and the Discourse of Disability. In: Bradshaw, M. (eds) Disabling Romanticism. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6_6
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