Mary Robinson was born in Bristol on 27th November 1758. Her father Nicholas Darby was an American-born merchant, while her mother, Hester Darby, claimed aristocratic descent from the Seys of Boverton Casle in South Wales, who in turn boasted family links with the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. Robinson was one of three surviving children born to the Darbys; her brothers John and George followed their father into trade, both becoming successful merchants at Leghorn.
In her posthumously published Memoirs (1801) Robinson suggests that her birth during a tremendous thunderstorm foreshadowed the “tempest” of her life in “this world of duplicity and sorrow”. Robinson's unconventional, peripatetic …
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