In this paper I cast Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800) as a feral figure and suggest that a consideration of the feral is central to an understanding of both her life and work. Here I look briefly at Robinson’s 1801 Memoirs and their Continuation (thought to have been compiled/written by Robinson’s daughter Maria Elizabeth and Robinson’s friend, Samuel Jackson Pratt)¹ and two of her poems about wildness, madness and marginality, “The Maniac” from Robinson’s 1793 Poems, written overnight under the influence of eighty drops of laudanum and “The Savage of Aveyron,” Robinson’s response to the sensational news story of the capture of a feral boy in south-central France in 1799 from her 1806 Poetical Works. I locate Robinson’s ferality first in what I call her ‘thingness’ and later in her ‘difference’ – her identity after 1783 as a physically disabled woman addicted to opiates (which she used to manage pain). Incorporating the feral as a rich unaccountability between domesticated and wild into a reading of these texts necessitates a rethinking of Robinson’s relationship to and in her world and our world. As a conceptual framework, the feral also offers a potential for new assessments of the roles feminist literary critics play in the post-recovery milieu of twenty-first century feminism.