strike a pose; Actress, fashion pioneer, author, sex object.(Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson )(Book Review)

Byline: Leslie Camhi

If the modern age began in the eighteenth century, Mary Robinson was among the first to embrace it. A celebrated actress, royal mistress, and, later, distinguished woman of letters (whose roman a clef about her love affair with the prince of Wales became an overnight sensation), this inordinately beautiful daughter of a disgraced British merchant instinctively grasped the new truth-that the successful manipulation of one's image, in print and in person, guaranteed one's standing in society.

Robinson was perhaps the most frequently painted woman of her era. The great English portraitists-Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney-all tried (and reputedly failed) to capture her ineffable loveliness. She was also repeatedly caricatured-popular cartoonists had a field day pillorying her notorious liaisons with powerful men, from princes to politicians and generals. The newspapers were filled with breathless reports on everything from the color of her latest carriage to the cut of her gowns (she favored simple, flowing chemises) to the decor of her opera box, which was lined with mirrors and cushioned in pink satin.

Literary fame may scorn such credentials-but after a sudden illness left her partially paralyzed at the age of 25, Mrs. Robinson remade herself as part of a select circle of leading intellectuals. Her copious verses, Gothic novels, and essays on subjects ranging from the martyrdom of her friend Marie Antoinette to the rights of women earned her the admiration of writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom posterity has treated more kindly.

Imagine Nicole Kidman, Monica Lewinsky, Susan Sontag, and Madonna all rolled into one, then ask yourself, how is it that we've never heard of her? Utterly absorbing, Paula Byrne's intensely researched Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (Random House) aims to restore a measure of fame to a woman who, though a product of her time, seems our near-contemporary in her understanding of the workings of celebrity.

Mary Robinson, nee Darby, was born in Bristol, the daughter of a prosperous businessman who lost his fortune when she was nine in a failed fishing venture off the coast of Newfoundland and abandoned his family for his mistress. Mary was just fifteen in 1773 when she married Thomas Robinson, a clerk and the pretended heir to a Welsh estate (a fraud unmasked shortly after their union). For a while they led a fashionable life in London until Robinson's debts, exacerbated by his infidelities, landed him in prison for more than a year; Mary and the couple's infant daughter, Maria Elizabeth, accompanied him.

Emerging from captivity with no visible means of support, Mary turned to the stage, where she was coached by David Garrick, the greatest actor of the day. She made her debut as Juliet in Drury Lane to thunderous applause. Her marriage was a sham, but her career was thriving. A ...