“[L]ines, evidently written by a female hand”

Mothers and Daughters in Mary Robinson’s Vancenza

Abstract

A celebrated public figure who became an iconic woman, Mary Robinson was an actress and a member of a community of eighteenth-century intellectual women writers. This study discusses her first novel, Vancenza (1792), and focuses on the relationship between the young protagonist, the orphan Elvira and her dead mother. By analysing Elvira’s explorations and discoveries in the castle and eliciting the features of the Gothic in the novel, I intend to show how the discourse of authorship is framed within the daughter’s urge to find out about her origins and her mother’s revelatory written texts.