Lewis, Estelle (Anna) Robinson

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LEWIS, Estelle (Anna) Robinson

Born April 1824, Baltimore, Maryland; died 24 November 1880, London, England

Wrote under: Estelle Anna Lewis, Estelle Anna Blanche Lewis, Estelle Anna Robinson Lewis, Stella

Daughter of John N. Robinson; married Sylvanus D. Lewis, 1841

Estelle Robinson Lewis was the daughter of a wealthy, cultivated, and influential Cuban of English and Spanish parentage, who died in her childhood. She attended Emma Hart Willard's Female Seminary, where she studied "masculine" subjects including law. After leaving school in 1841, she continued a regimen of independent study in classical and modern languages, comparative literature, and history. She published her first poem at fourteen; married a Brookyn lawyer at seventeen; and published a first book of poems at twenty. Sharing an enthusiasm for the work of Edgar Allan Poe with whom her husband began a friendship in 1845, Lewis and her husband are remembered in accounts of the Poe circle. As Poe pointed out—however ironically in view of his own goaded imagination—the predominant trait of Lewis' disposition was "a certain romantic sensibility, bordering upon melancholy, or even gloom."

Divorced in 1858, Lewis traveled in Europe, read at the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Imperiale, and lived for the last decades of her life in London, where she took a house in Bedford Square and studied frequently at the British Museum. Having published occasional translations of Virgil, articles on travel and American art, stories and a play, as well as additional poetry, she then wrote her most ambitious work, a dramatization in verse of Sappho's life. Appearing in 1868, it was widely reviewed in England, the U.S., and France, translated into modern Greek, and staged in Athens. In the complexity of characterization, Lewis anticipates the Sappho later revealed by scholarly research as a woman with primitive passions, unappeasable longing, frailties of ego, and an imperious will, but Lewis' awareness of the poet's keen intelligence, charms, and genius is not matched by the pedestrian verse.

Lewis is usually mentioned in Poe biographies as a scribbling woman given to immense sentimentality, but she is rather an expert in the histrionics of passion. The title of the first poems, Records of the Heart (1844), could serve for all of Lewis' major work; the convulsive emotions and fickle vows of love resulting in "frightful wrecks of mutual ill" for both men and women are her most persistent themes. Although she relies on the exhausted conventions, language and meters of romantic poetry in her period, she has nevertheless a disciplined energy for her criticisms of life from a woman's point of view. She is a formidable scribbler.

Lewis' imagination is perhaps at its best in "Laone," a history of adolescent conflict. The poem depicts the harsh consequences of a relationship between two young people who have been inseparable for five years. The boy develops sexually and emotionally much earlier than the shy girl he has protected since their childhood as a promise to her dying father. Neither youth is censured for the disparity in needs or the failure to perceive them until it is too late. A century before Robert Frost's comparable poem, "The Subverted Flower," for instance, Lewis confronts the subject with more equanimity than either Frost or a mere sentimentalist, in spite of the fact that she writes in the cadences, images, and metaphors of an age when natural expression was inhibited by scrupulous nicety or plain prudery.

The ambitions of Lewis, it has been said, "were underwritten by her husband and Poe." While she benefited from their aid, she also received early commendation by poets as different as William Cullen Bryant and Lamartine. Records of the Heart was, moreover, in an eleventh edition, and Sappho, in a sixth edition at the time of her death. The rapid decline in Lewis' reputation can be accounted for not only by the derivative manner of the verse but also by radical changes in taste.

Other Works:

Child of the Sea, and Other Poems (1848). Myths of the Minstrel (1852). Poems by Estelle Anna Lewis (1857). Sappho: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1868). The King's Stratagem; or, The Pearl of Poland (1869). Minna Monte (1872).