A Letter to the Women of England

"Let me talk about the author first, because she is absolutely fantastic. Mary Robinson, whose stage name was Perdita and who was known as Mary “Perdita” Robinson, really epitomises the new opportunities for women that opened up in the 18th century. She was a fantastically successful actress, a writer and a poet, and also a famous lover. If you were to put it unfairly, you’d say she was a successful courtesan. She had a string of affairs with very powerful men, most importantly the Prince of Wales himself, and she did it on her own terms. She was not a call girl or a prostitute, but an independent, feisty and sexually free woman. This was the first period in history in which it was possible for someone like that to even exist. She made a career for herself across a variety of spheres. There’s a bit in my book about her career as a blackmailer as well. She is cast off by the Prince of Wales because he tires of her, but she kept all his love letters. So she publicly threatened – quite a conventional thing at the time – to publish all his letters unless he treated her better. She was granted a pension for life of £5,000 a year, which is a huge sum of money. So she was one of the originators of the kiss-and-tell – or rather the kiss-and-not-tell – on rather a large scale. What is particularly fantastic is that she wrote so much and expressed her views so forthrightly. I wanted to include this book to show the extraordinary degree to which early feminists of the 18th century were able to look clearly at the sexual mores of their time – and the double standard in particular whereby men were allowed to get away with so much more than women – and dissect them, talking about their unfairness and how they are socially constructed rather than natural. In her own life, she also epitomised both the opportunities and the limits of sexual freedom for women at this moment of the first sexual revolution. She was able to lead this life, but it was not the same as a man like James Boswell, who gets away with it scot-free. Everyone has heard of Mary Wollstonecraft , but Mary Robinson writes about sex much more forthrightly and with much more humour that Mary Wollstonecraft ever did, and this tract A Letter to the Women of England is a great short pamphlet. It points out the unfairness of the social, political and sexual constraints that women were under, and it calls for them to be lifted. Another thing it does, which might come as a surprise to modern readers, is show how far back the origins of modern feminism really go."