Bell’s Laureates I: Robinson’s Avatars and the Della Crusca Network

Abstract

In this brief passage from her final novel, Robinson provides the best commentary of the past 200 years on what the so-called Della Cruscans were doing in their poetry. With good humor, Robinson parodies yet implicitly defends the poetry that made her famous and that she never completely abandoned. In The Natural Daughter, the heroine, Martha Morley, after attempting a career on the stage, turns to poetry as a professional recourse. Mirroring some elements of Robinson’s own history, Martha endures the vicissitudes of being a professional woman writer and, in dire straits, determines to seek the patronage of an aristocratic woman. In order to earn this support, Martha is put on display as a young “poetess” before a group of ladies and gentleman, who are, in the words of the potential patron, “‘several excellent judges and some successful authors’” (7: 132). Thus humiliated she must read aloud from her odes, which she describes as “rather allegorical than serious” in order to assure her potential patron that they are not “pathetic” or mournfully sad (7: 131). Here, Robinson makes an important point about her own odes—a form, at this time, in which she had not worked for several years but one that early on defined her poetry as “Della Cruscan.”

Are you Anna Matilda, or Della Crusca, or Laura Maria? Comical creatures! they have made me shed many a tear, though I never more than half understood them.

—Robinson, The Natural Daughter (1799)