Historian/Author Guy De La Bedoyere has been on Time Team on many occasions. His great, great, great, great, great grandma, the 1st Marchioness of Salisbury was painted by Joshua Reynolds - as was Perdita.

Mary was born in Bristol in 1757 or 1758 (the vagueness is typical of her; she managed her image carefully). The only daughter of a prosperous merchant, she was unusually well educated for a girl of that time but before she reached her teens, her father disappeared to Canada with his mistress and spent all the family’s money. Finding a solvent husband for Mary became her mother’s priority. At the age of 15, Mary was married to Thomas Robinson, a trainee solicitor with apparently good prospects.

But he had lied about his circumstances and he, Mary and their baby daughter were soon in a debtors’ prison. When they were released, Mary set about repairing their fortunes. Within months, she had transformed herself into a celebrated actress under the wing of David Garrick, although her success was perhaps due more to her beauty and charm than to any dramatic talent.

Witty and flirtatious, Mary soon made friends in high places. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was a lifelong friend and patron, as where Sheridan and Coleridge. At 21, she played Perdita at Drury Lane in Perdita and Florizel, Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. The 17-year-old Prince of Wales – later to become George IV – was in the audience and fell in love with her.

He promptly dubbed himself her Florizel, and pursued her hysterically. She was his first great passion, and set the pattern for all the others. He was clinging, fond and babyish. Mary began an affair with him that catapulted her to the very pinnacle of celebrity. During this affair the popular press followed her every move. There was no warning of the final breach; the last time they met as lovers, he was as ardent and attentive as ever. But, under pressure from his father, who hated the notoriety associated with the affair, the Prince broke it off.

Paradoxically, Mary became even more famous now that it was over. The press feasted on the rivalry between her and the Prince’s new mistress, Mrs Armistead – which continued when Mary began an affair with the Prince’s friend Charles James Fox.

The public was fascinated by everything ‘Perdita’ did: where she shopped; what she wore; her hats; her house in Berkeley Square; her powder-blue carriage, attended by servants in matching livery and drawn by four chestnut ponies. Always, immaculately dressed, she became a leader of fashion; women flocked to buy the ‘Robinson vest’, the ‘Robinson hat’, the ‘Perdita chemise’. She skilfully manipulated her public image through a succession of portraits by Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough, reproduced in innumerable prints. Like a modern celebrity, she was able to commission a portrait without paying a fee, because of her publicity value.

Mary, however, was soon forced to change the direction of her life. In the course of a typically dramatic dash after her then lover, the war hero Banastre Tarleton (the man who could be said to have loved her best, probably most, and certainly longest their relationship was to last 15 years), she suffered a mysterious attack of illness which left her semi-paralysed from the waist down. She was 26 years old. No longer the marketable beauty or the stage commodity, Paula concentrated thereafter on writing, and in the last decade of her life, she achieved an astonishing transformation, reinventing herself as ‘the English Sappho’ in a flood of poems, romances, novels, a tragedy, and other literary works.

Paula suggests that Mary Robinson may have anticipated Coleridge, De Quincey and Keats in discussing the effects of opiates in poetry, and approvingly cites one modern critic’s claim that ‘Tennyson’s Mariana could not have been written without Mary Robinson’s experiments to create a new lyric form in English verse’. That her presence was felt in the Romantic landscape is undeniable – Wordsworth even considered changing the title of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads to avoid confusion with or contamination by Robinson’s own collection, Lyrical Tales. Coleridge persuaded Southey to include one of her poems in his Annual Anthology. ‘She is a woman of undoubted Genius,’ he wrote. ‘She overloads every thing: but I never knew a human being so full – bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full, and overflowing.’

She used her public platforms to air the radical themes of the day, protesting against slavery and social injustice and arguing for university education for women. Mary Wollstonecraft became a firm friend and admirer and Paula argues convincingly that Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination deserves as much attention as Wollstonescraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Right up until her death Mary Robinson embraced all aspects of life and was ashamed of nothing that she had done.

Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, her second book, is a full-scale literary biography. Despite the historical nature of her books, Paula thinks of herself as a writer rather than an academic. ‘I’ve always been in love with the 18th century – the novels, the plays, the clothes, the manners, the elegance, the architecture, and the music. I’m still obsessed with the 18th century and I think I always will be.’

Now based in Stratford-Upon-Avon with her two young children and her husband, critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, Paula still lives and works very close to her roots.

Paula finds that she works best in the mornings and tries to be at her desk before 9 am. ‘I have always been quite self-disciplined and motivated, and try to ensure that I write something every day (even if it’s just taking notes). Having written her first book between her pregnancies, Paula says that now her children are at primary school is feels like a luxury to have so much time. ‘Writing is the best job in the world, and I’m lucky to do something that I love.’

Paula is currently writing a biography of the marriage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – the celebrity couple of the Jazz age.

INSPIRATION FOR PERDITA:

Described in her day as the most beautiful woman in England, Mary Robinson was an actress, courtesan, relentless self-promoter, poet and novelist. She was both admired and despised. Society in the late-18th century was just as preoccupied with public figures as it is today and Mary knew how to manipulate the scandal sheets.

Paula’s book is a superbly researched and narrated look at the life of a woman whose capacity for self-transformation, when combined with beauty, talent, wit and passion, was unsurpassed. It is, as Paula observes, extraordinary that such a remarkable personality should, until now, have escaped attention. She first came across Mary Robinson when she was researching her first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre. She says, ‘I was fascinated by her extraordinary life story, and then I discovered that she was also a highly successful poet and novelist. It seemed to me incredible that such an interesting woman had been allowed to fade into obscurity.’

‘To my mind Mary Robinson is the quintessential post-feminist. She championed equal educational opportunities (such as universities for women) and was herself an intellectual who was not afraid to shine in a man’s world, but she also loved glamour and shopping. She was a beautiful woman, who was in touch with her sexuality, and enjoyed both male and female company. She was also a devoted mother and daughter, and supported young, aspiring women writers. As usual, Mary was way ahead of her time.’

The Battle library has two reading groups of about twelve members and on the day of filming there will be an amalgamation of these two groups. Their ages range from 50 years old up to 80! They are a lively group especially the three men I am told; who normally meet once a month and read a mixture between classic greats such as “The Great Gatsby” by F Scott Fitzgerald to more contemporary novels.

Here's what they thought...

“I really loved this book. The book was a serious history but it read like a novel. I couldn’t put it down.”

“I think this is a vivid and well researched book. I only wish the author had done a lot more editing and made it about half the length.”

“What really impressed me about this remarkable book beyond the dazzling beauty of Mrs Robinson was her intellect and in her last years when she was sick and frail it was her intellect and not her fading beauty that sustained her.”

“This book is brilliantly researched. I found it quite a difficult read. It is quite lengthy and very detailed but this is in amazing lady and every facet of her extraordinary life is in this book.”

“This was definitely a book for me. I thoroughly recommend it.”

The members who attended were: Pamela Bourne, Joy Bryant, Chris Hart, Sue Whitehead, Carol Legg, Peter Heald, Valerie Tegg, Carole Tricket, Margaret Woolf, Graeme Marsdon, Leila Carson, Jean Hurlow, Maureen Dixon, Josephine Hopkinson, Margaret Hutchings, June Cleminson, Alan Gibbon, Penny Colquen.

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