Elizabeth Robins

Not to be confused with the writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855-1936).

Elizabeth Robins
Born	1862 Louisville, Kentucky
Died	1952
Other names	C.E. Raimond
Spouse	George Richmond Parks (1885-1887)

Elizabeth Robins (August 6, 1862 – May 8, 1952) was an actress, playwright, novelist, and suffragette.

Early life

Elizabeth Robins, the first child of Charles Robins and Hannah Crow, and was born in Louisville, Kentucky. After financial difficulties, her father left for Colorado, leaving the children in the care of Hannah. When Hannah was committed to an insane asylum, Elizabeth and the other children were divided up between relatives and Elizabeth was sent to live with her grandmother in Zanesville, Ohio, where she was educated. Her father was a follower of Robert Owen and held progressive political views. Because of her intelligence, Elizabeth was one of her father's favorites. He wanted her to attend Vassar College and study medicine. However, when she was eighteen she ran away to become an actress.

Acting career

She had her early training as an actress with the Boston Museum stock company, and afterwards with Edwin Booth. In 1885 Robins married actor George Richmond Parks. Although her husband struggled to get parts, her own acting career gained momentum and she was soon in great demand. On May 31, 1887, Parks left her a note saying he would 'stay in her light no longer' and committed suicide. Suffering from grief and guilt Robins relocated to London the following year. Except for extended visits to the U.S. to visit family, she remained in England for the rest of her life. She first appeared in The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1889. Early in her tenure in London, she became enamoured of Ibsen's plays, starring in Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House and The Master Builder. She soon became known in Britain as "Ibsen's High Priestess." Although she was a gifted actress and she remained one of Britain's most highly respected thespians, her association with Ibsen kept producers from considering her for other roles and limited her acting career. In 1902 she was Lucrezia in Stephen Phillips's Paolo and Francesca at the St. James's Theatre, London.

Writing career

Robins realized her income from acting was not stable enough to carry her. An able writer, she turned to the pen, publishing a number of well-received novels at first under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. She explained her use of a pseudonym as a means of keeping her acting and writing careers separate but gave it up when the media reported that Robins and Raimond were the same. She enjoyed a long career as a fiction and nonfiction writer. She retired from the stage at the age of 40.

Women's rights involvement

She became a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, as well as the Women's Social and Political Union, although she broke with the WPSU over its increasing use of violent militancy. She remained a strong advocate of women's rights, however, and used her gifts as a public speaker and writer on behalf of the cause. In 1907 her book The Convert was published. It was later turned into a play that became synonymous with the suffrage movement. Robins remained an active feminist throughout her life. In the 1920s she was a regular contributor to the feminist magazine, Time and Tide. She also continued to write books such as Ancilla's Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, which explored the issues of sexual inequality. She collected and edited speeches, lectures, and articles dealing with the women’s movement, some of which had never previously appeared in print (Way Stations, published by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1913).

Robins was involved in the campaign to allow women to enter the House of Lords. Her friend, Margaret Haig, was the daughter of Viscount Rhondda. He was a supporter of women's rights and in his will made arrangements for Margaret to inherit his title. This was considered radical, as women did not normally inherit peerage titles. When Rhondda died in 1918 the House of Lords refused to allow Margaret, now the Viscountess Rhondda, to take her seat. Robins wrote numerous articles on the subject, but the House of Lords refused to change its decision. It was not until 1958 that women were first admitted to the House.

Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, 1st Baron Pethick-Lawrence credited Robins with explaining to him the difference between a suffragette and a suffragist.

Personal life

A beautiful woman, Robins was pursued by many men. She admitted to a deep attraction to her close friend, the highly respected literary critic and fellow Ibsen scholar, William Archer. As a married man Archer was unavailable, however. Except for her brief marriage to George Parks, she remained a fiercely independent single woman. Highly intelligent, she was welcomed into the cream of London's literary and artistic circles, enjoying friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, as well as a tempestuous romantic (but probably non-physical) relationship with the much younger future poet laureate John Masefield.

In 1900 she traveled alone to the gold rush camps of Alaska in search of her favorite brother Raymond Robins whom she feared was lost in the Yukon. After a long and arduous journey, she located Raymond in Nome. She shared his life in wild and lawless Alaska throughout the summer of 1900. Her adventures were not without cost – the typhoid fever she contracted at that time compromised her health for the rest of her life. Robins's tales about Alaska provided material for a number of articles she sent on to London for publication. Her best selling book, The Magnetic North, is an account of her experiences, as is The Alaska-Klondike Diary of Elizabeth Robins.

Although she rejected her father's plans to be educated as a doctor, she retained a strong interest in medicine. In 1909 she met Octavia Wilberforce, a young woman whose fervent desire to study medicine was thwarted by a family that felt intellectualism and professional careers were 'unsexing' for women. When Wilberforce's father not only refused to pay for her studies, but disinherited her for pursuing them, Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she became a physician. While some have conjectured that Robins and Wilberforce were romantically involved, such insinuation has never been supported by the considerable scholarly material available about both women, nor is it born out in their own copious written material. All evidence points to Robins and Wilberforce enjoying a relationship much like that of mother and daughter. In her declining years she developed a friendship with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Dr Wilberforce, the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, the British emancipator of slaves, looked after Robins until her death in 1952, just months shy of her 90th birthday.

Works

As C. E. Raimond, she wrote:

• George Mandeville's Husband, 1894
• The New Moon, 1895
• Below the Salt, 1896
• The Open Question, 1898

The success of this last novel led to her publishing under her own name:

• The Alaska-Klondike diary of Elizabeth Robins, 1900
• The magnetic north, 1904
• A Dark Lantern, 1905
• The convert, 1907

Votes for Women! (A suffrage play produced at he Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London), 1907.

• Come and Find Me, 1908, a sequel to The magnetic north
• Camilla, 1918
• The Messenger, 1920
• Ancilla's share : an indictment of sex antagonism, 1924

See also

• History of feminism
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom

References

• Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952
• Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire: Gender, Racial, and Colonial Issues in Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Elizabeth Robins, and Amy Levy. The Ohio State University Press, 2005.
• Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth, Robins, 1862-1952, Actress, Novelist, Feminist
• The Alaska-Klondike Diary of Elizabeth Robins, 1900
• Pat Jalland, ed., Octavia Wilberforce:The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor
• The Papers of Elizabeth Robins at Fales Library, New York University
• Chronology and Bibliography
• The Magnetic North at Project Gutenberg
•  "Robins, Elizabeth". Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). 1922. 

External links

• Works by or about Elizabeth Robins in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
•  "Robins, Elizabeth". Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.