Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952: actress, novelist, feminist

Abstract

American expatriate Elizabeth Robins was a remarkable woman of her times. She was more instrumental than any other single performer in the staging of Ibsen plays in England in the 1890s. This study of her life and literary work is the first to benefit from access to the Elizabeth Robins Collection, a treasure trove of personal and family documents, and it demonstrates how thoroughly Robins transformed her own life into literary and dramatic capital. Robins wrote about her part in a changing theater world with a sense of female difference. Many unpublished novels and stories reveal how she used her own life as the source of her fiction. She transformed her long personal history of ill-health and poor medical treatment into feminist concerns. At many points in her life, Elizabeth Robins confronted deep, personal crises, and her fiction is marked by a number of true-life components: the formative experiences of her childhood, an actress's coming of age, a husband's flirtation with suicide, a widow's freedom to sacrifice a second romance for independence, and the abuses of the rest cure treatment. Robins published several novels under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond, culminating in the sensational male-female bildungsroman, The Open Question: A Tale of Two Temperaments, which was set in her native Zanesville, Ohio, and publication of which disclosed her identity. Robins contracted to write journal articles prior to her 1900 trip to Alaska, so she carefully documented her travels and used her personal journal as the source for two novels, the memoir of her brother Raymond Robins, and many stories and articles, all based on life experiences that touched her audiences and created a strongfollowing. Her fiction is compared to that of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. Many of her heroines share the characteristics of exhibiting forced or willed silence, and Gates's analysis of this trait has implications for feminist theorists in a number of fields. Robins resp