Duclaux, Agnes Mary F (1856–1944)

English poet and critic. Name variations: Mary F. Robinson; Agnes Mary Frances Robinson; A. Mary F. Robinson; Mary Darmesteter. Born Agnes Mary Frances Robinson at Leamington, England, on February 27, 1856; educated at University College, London; married James Darmesteter (1849–1894, an Oriental scholar); married Pierre Émile Duclaux, in 1901 (died 1904).

Agnes Duclaux studied Greek literature at University College, London. She followed her first volume of poetry, A Handful of Honeysuckle (1879), with a translation from Euripides entitled The Crowned Hippolytus (1881). Duclaux also published monographs on Emily Brontë (1883) and on Margaret of Angoulême (1886).The New Arcadia and Other Poems (1884) and An Italian Garden (1886) were said to include some of her best verses. The Orientalist James Darmesteter, then in Peshawur, became interested in her poems which he then translated into French. They married in 1888, after which much of her work was written in French. Darmesteter's Études anglaises was translated into English by Duclaux (1896).

She also wrote Life of Ernest Renan (1897); End of the Middle Ages (1888); Retrospect and Other Poems (1893); the volume on Froissart (1894) in the Grands écrivains français; essays on the Brontës, the Brownings and others, entitled Grands écrivains d'Outre-Manche (1901); The Return to Nature, Songs and Symbols (1904). After her first husband's death, in 1901 she married Émile Duclaux, the associate of Pasteur, and director of the Pasteur institute. Her Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative were published in 1902, two years before her second husband's death. The quality of her work was only gradually recognized.