Elizabeth Robins

by

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Alexandra Paddock, Daniel Abdalla

• LAST REVIEWED: 29 May 2019
• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0154

Introduction

Elizabeth Robins (b. 1862–d. 1952) was an American actress, novelist, playwright, suffragist campaigner, journalist, and theater manager who spent most of her career in Britain. A key champion of Ibsen’s plays in England, she founded her own theater company along with fellow actress Marion Lea in order to produce some of Ibsen’s plays, premiering roles such as Hedda Gabler and Hilde Wangel. As a dramatist, she is best known for her play Votes for Women! (1907), which played a central role in the suffrage movement. Her anonymously published and performed play Alan’s Wife (1893), coauthored with Lady Florence Bell, explored taboo themes such as infanticide, postpartum depression, and euthanasia. She was also an accomplished writer of fiction, some of which she published under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond until, after the publication of the well-received novel The Open Question (1898), her true identity was revealed. She received much acclaim—including by figures such as Mark Twain—for The Magnetic North (1904), a novel that fictionalized the journey she had taken to Alaska. Her unpublished works, housed in the New York University Library’s Fales Collection, are extensive and largely unexplored, and they include letters, diaries, journals, promptbooks, plays, novels, and other prose works. Robins was born in Kentucky and spent much of her childhood on Staten Island, New York. Her mother’s mental health in decline (she died in an institution in 1901), Robins developed a close relationship with her youngest brother, Raymond, and also found support in her grandmother. Her father, an enthusiast of the scientific developments of the time, boldly took his young daughter to the “Little Annie” mining camp in Colorado, where he was working, so she could get a geological education and keep abreast of new scientific developments, which he hoped would feed into her eventual medical career. She would draw on this knowledge throughout her literary works, for example “The Mills of the Gods.” But Robins was drawn to the stage and at age nineteen embarked on a theatrical career. Her experience of the challenges of the mining camp gave her resilience as a traveling actor. She travelled with James O’Neill (the father of the 20th-century playwright Eugene O’Neill) and his theater company in 1882–1883 and 1885–1886. In 1887, the suicide of her husband and fellow actor George Richmond Parks (he intentionally walked into the Charles River wearing a suit of stage armor) prompted her to travel abroad, to Norway and England. Professional connections helped her to find opportunities on London’s stages, and, consequently, she made England her home from the mid-1880s onward, though she remained an American citizen. Her lucky break came with the plays of Ibsen, then beginning to be staged in Britain. Robins’s last stage appearance was in 1902. For the remainder of her long career, Robins wrote constantly, both nonfiction and fiction; continued to spearhead the women’s suffrage movement (at one point she was believed to be concealing Isabel Pankhurst in her house in Sussex). Her works explored some of the biggest questions of the day, such as racial emancipation and sex trafficking (then called the “white slave trade”). She helped to edit the feminist journal Time and Tide in the 1920s. She was a close friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, in part through her long relationship with Octavia Wilberforce, whose career as a female doctor she helped to support financially. Through these connections, late in life, she became a key primary source for Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. Edel began but eventually abandoned a biography of Robins. Although firmly aligned with feminism and a leading New Woman writer, Robins moved in circles whose members have become part of a male-centric canon (James, Shaw, Wilde, Masefield, and many others), and critical reception and interpretation of her work have often been fractured because of this diffused identity across many different areas of activity, as well as her own ambivalence about marriage and motherhood. Robins has long been studied by theater historians, feminist studies scholars, and Ibsen specialists and is now receiving attention for her relevance to literature and science studies and medical humanities, as her work deals extensively with hereditary disease, euthanasia, women and illness, female alcoholism, biological determinism, geology, mineral extraction, race, sexuality, and mental disorder.

General Overviews and Biographies

There are two major biographies: Gates 1994 and John 1995. Though radically different in their approaches, these are still the most comprehensive surveys of Robins across the many areas of her life and work. Scholarly attention has focused overwhelmingly on Robins’s work in the 1890s as an actress, Ibsen champion, and playwright, but Park 2003 and Thomas 1993[?] both pay considerable attention to Robins’s other writings, and Gates 1994 gives a good sense of the vast archives of unpublished material produced by Robins that have yet to be fully mined. Wilberforce’s unpublished autobiography (see Papers of Octavia Wilberforce under Unpublished Materials) devoted much of its content to Robins’s life—she had worked with the famed Henry James biographer Leon Edel on an eventually aborted biography of Robins (Edel 1969)—but in Wilberforce 1989, the edited and published edition of Wilberforce’s biography, some of the Robins material was removed.

• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. “Robins, Elizabeth.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. 12th ed. London and New York: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1922.

  Chisholm very briefly characterizes Robins’s professional life, including her training as an actress, her significant performances in London from 1889 to 1902, her novels written under pseudonyms and her own name from 1894 to 1920, and her work for female suffrage, including her 1907 play, Votes for Women! This text is available via wikisource.

• Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969.

  Edel draws on both his interviews with Robins as well as her archival material throughout this volume (and Volume 5) of his biography. In the section of this volume dedicated to Robins’s life (“Saint Elizabeth”), he is critical of her stage career as well as her published collection of James’s letters, Theatre & Friendship: Some Henry James Letters (1932).

• Gates, Joanna E. Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994.

  Gates draws on unpublished archival sources that she has been instrumental in making public, and she frames each chapter with a miniature dramatic dialogue in which she imagines each phase of Robins’s life as it might be staged. Gates explores Robins’s writing “in the context of her developing feminist aesthetic,” of which Robins’s career as an actress and Ibsen champion forms a part but is not the main focus here.

• John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862–1952. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

  John’s comprehensive biography examines Robins’s sense of self-presentation, comparing her various modes of self-framing throughout her life. She draws on Robins’s papers, including unpublished drafts of her writing, in order to trace how Robins engaged with life-writing, and also to show how this examination inevitably reevaluates John’s own scholarly purpose as a biographer. Includes extensive illustrations and appendices on Robins’s theater appearances, publications, and suffragist writing.

• John, Angela V. “Robins, Elizabeth.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Rev. ed. Edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  Drawing on her work in Staging a Life, John outlines Robins’s life from birth to death, highlighting her early life in the United States, her acting career in London, and her work with Florence Bell and Henry James. John then parallels Robins’s emerging suffragism with her transition into writing as her main profession, and also details Robins’s late interest in memoir and biography before her death. First published 2004. Available online by subscription.

• Kelly, Katherine E. “Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952).” In British Playwrights, 1860–1956: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Edited by William Demastes, 352–363. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.

  Alphabetically ordered entries in this volume include Robins as a significant British playwright in the period (although she was US-born). Kelly emphasizes Robins’s work as a stage manager, playwright, and polemicist, as well as a leading Ibsen actress, and her increasing turn from theater to writing at the age of forty, in 1902 (with the exception of her play Votes for Women! in 1907). The entry also includes a list of major works, archival sources, and a bibliography.

• MacKay, Carol Hanbery. Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

  Robins is grouped with poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and activist-spiritualist Annie Besant as wielders of “creative negativity,” Mackay’s term for a complex transhistorical feminist tactic that they practice in different ways as part of a “female quest.” This notion sheds light on Robins’s exceptionally diverse career as one long creative interpretation of herself; an attempt at female self-expression in a male-dominated world.

• Park, Sowon. “Elizabeth Robins.” In Literary Encyclopedia. Edited by Robert Clark. London: Literary Dictionary, 2003.

  Park provides a brief overview of Robins’s career and links to the full texts of several of her works spanning 1894–1908, including George Mandeville’s Husband, The New Moon, Below the Salt and Other Stories, The Magnetic North, The Convert, and Come and Find Me. This article can be accessed by institutional subscription to The Literary Encyclopedia.

• Rudolph, Laura C. “Robins, Elizabeth.” In American National Biography. Edited by John Arthur Garraty and Mark Christopher Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Comprehensive summary of Robins’s life and career, with particular attention to North American contexts, including authors Robins knew or who reviewed her work. Available online by subscription.

• Thomas, Sue. Elizabeth Robins. Victorian Fiction Research Guides 22, 1993[?].

  This comprehensive guide to Robins’s life and career predates and indeed anticipates the published biographies by Gates and John. Most of Robins’s published works, as well as some of her unpublished ones, are discussed and briefly contextualized. This was originally a print source and readers should be warned that in the process of digitization some typographical errors have crept in, which can be distracting. Consulting the original print version would be preferable to using the online one.

• Whitebrook, Peter. William Archer: A Biography. London: Methuen, 1993.

  In exploring the life and career of Ibsen’s main champion and translator, Whitebrook also devotes much space to Robins, whom he presents (with reasonably persuasive evidence) as Archer’s lover. He also gives insight into her influential participation in late Victorian theater as well as that of other actresses at the time, including Bernhardt, Terry, and Duse.

• Wilberforce, Octavia. Octavia Wilberforce: The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor. Edited by Pat Jalland. London: Cassell, 1989.

  Wilberforce substantially treats Robins, underscoring Robins’s unwavering support for Wilberforce’s career. Wilberforce also provides further details of her relationship with Robins, as well as their friendships with the Woolfs, Lady Rhondda, and George Bernard Shaw. Jalland’s edition of the biography has removed some, but not all of, the Robins material. For the full, unedited manuscript, see Papers of Octavia Wilberforce (cited under Primary Materials: Unpublished Materials).