Marriage
Hester Derby encouraged her daughter to accept the proposal of an articled clerk, Thomas Robinson, who claimed to have an inheritance. Mary was against this idea, however after being stricken ill, and watching him take care of her and her younger brother, she felt that she owed him, and she did not want to disappoint her mother who was pushing for the engagement. After the early marriage, Robinson discovered that her husband did not have an inheritance. He continued to live an elaborate lifestyle however, and had multiple affairs that he made no effort to hide. Subsequently, she supported their family. After her husband squandered their money, the couple fled to Wales (where Robinson's only daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was born in November). The family lived under house-arrest after Robinson's husband was imprisoned for debt. During this time, Mary Robinson found a patron in Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who sponsored the publication of Robinson's first volume of poems, Captivity.
Read more about this topic: Mary Robinson (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
“For the longest time, marriage has had a guilty conscience about itself. Should we believe it?—Yes, we should believe it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)