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Though denounced by the anti-Jacobin poet and theologian Rev. Richard Polwhele in his The Unsex'd Females: A Poem (1798) as a radical and follower of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson was not primarily known as a reformer or an activist in her lifetime. Mainly following the conventions of eighteenth-century writers of sensibility, she produced an admirable quantity of lyric poems and sentimental novels. Her friends and admirers called her the "Sappho of our isle," a "sweet minstrel," and the "pensive songstress." In his poem "A Stranger Minstrel" (1800), Samuel Taylor Coleridge hailed her as "a Lady of sweet song." From her early days Robinson was concerned with the plight of women, the poor, and society's outcasts, and she wrote eloquently about them. Unlike Wollstonecraft or Mary Hays, who publicly supported the French Revolution in the early 1790s, Robinson was not outspoken or consistent in her politics. She was, in many ways, less an intellectual and philosopher than a woman who, through personal experiences and observation, became keenly aware of the inequalities in the social system and articulated them in her writing.
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