Elizabeth Robins

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 Her unpublished works, housed in the New York University Library’s Fales Collection, are extensive and largely unexplored, and they include letters, diaries, journals,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.