The Natural Daughter with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family is a novel by the English poet, dramatist and novelist Mary Robinson, published in 1799 by T. N. Longman and O. Rees in Paternoster Row in London.

[2] Robinson's narrative begins with the Bradford family travelling to Bath for the sake of its healing waters.

Peregrine Bradford, his wife and two daughters, Martha and Julia, are members of the middle-class who have recently built their fortune, however, they do not have official titles to secure their place among high society.

The main character, Martha (Bradford) Morley, continually seeks to dispute this idea by showing compassion towards others and straying from the path that will lead her to upper-class society.

Martha is portrayed as a more masculine woman who takes action, while her sister Julia is passive and full of sensibility, i.e. an emotional delicacy and extreme feeling.

[3] Not long into the marriage, Mr Morley leaves on business, which meant his estate was left to be run by Martha.

Martha offers to assist the young mother but is suddenly struck ill and cannot go to the village herself, so in her place, she sends a servant named Mrs Grimwood.

Mrs Grimwood's discovery of the child and its connection to Martha lead her to create false rumours which are spread as the chapter ends.

At the same time, Martha's sister Julia is beginning to step beyond the bounds of the ideal English woman's sensibility.

Under this influence, Julia takes a number of lovers including Mr Morley, Sir Lionel Beacon, and the notorious Robespierre.

Many members of the upper-class, such as Sir Lionel Beacon and Lady Penelope Pryer, come from old, inherited money that has never had to be earned.

During her career as an actress, she learns that Mrs Sedgley was in France during the first years of the revolution where she spent months in a French prison waiting to be executed by the infamous Marat.

Her anger at this betrayal by the publisher is mistaken for madness, and Martha is taken to a mad-house where she discovers her mother, Mrs Bradford.

The end of Robinson's novel is a whirlwind of plot twists that dramatically change the reader's perceptions of many of the main characters.

When Martha travels to France, she finds her sister dead in the Hotel de la Liberté after Julia announces her love affair with the notorious Robespierre.

In the end, Mr Morley is revealed to be the father of little Fanny and to "preserve" his own reputation as a pious man, attempts to kill the child.

The final paragraph of the novel ends with the narrator informing the reader of the whereabouts of Lady Penelope Pryer and her engagement to Gregory Leadenhead.

For example, women are tied to the idea that their honour relies on being chaste and respectable or in other words, their worth lies in the "purity" of their bodies.