Shortly before she died in 1800, the poet and novelist Mary Robinson reframed her life with some Gothic mythmaking. Picturing her birth in a ‘Minster-house’ attached to Bristol Cathedral, she describes a ‘tempestuous night’ during which ‘the wind whistled round the dark pinnacles of the minister tower, and the rain beat in torrents against the casements of [my mother's] chamber’ (Robinson 1994: 18). In the course of her memoir Robinson presents herself as a suffering heroine who deserves our compassion, but her claim on victimhood demonstrates her command of the Gothic: she is the mistress of this form, not its helpless construct. Crucially, she links Gothicism to literary fluency:

Robinson's recollections provide a useful guide to the poetic forms that helped shape early Gothic fiction. Although the bulk of this chapter will look at graveyard poetry, I want to start by unpicking some of the overlapping genres in Robinson's childhood reading. Doing so will establish the basic principle of my argument, which is that eighteenth-century poetry and the Gothic inhabit a shared discursive field where numerous strands intersect and cross over, sometimes running parallel, at other times diverging. Along the way I will analyse memorial texts, poems set in graveyards, poems about nightfall and mental disorder, and works that personify extreme emotions; I will also address the relationship between language and visual culture. The chapter will end by asking what the Gothic's debt to graveyard writing tells us about the social function of the novel.

Memorial Stones and Monuments

Although ‘epitaphs and monumental inscriptions’ are no longer popular reading matter, Robinson's memoir reminds us that the writers who forged Romanticism were raised on such materials.