Elizabeth Robins

Abstract

Elizabeth Robins (b. 1862–d. 1952) was an American actress, novelist, playwright, short story author, suffragist campaigner, journalist, and theatre manager who spent most of her career in Britain. A key champion of Ibsen’s plays in England, she founded her own theatre 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 wrote many works of fiction under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. Her unpublished works, housed in the New York University Library’s Fales Collection, are extensive and largely unexplored, and include letters, diaries, journals, promptbooks,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. Robins grew interested in drama and at age nineteen embarked on a stage career, first in New York and then in Boston. She married fellow actor George Richmond Parks in 1885. Two years later, he committed suicide by walking into the Charles River wearing a suit of stage armor. Robins then went on a grueling tour across the country with Edwin Booth before making England her home from the mid-1880s onward, though she remained an American citizen. Her lucky break came with the plays of Ibsen, who was 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, and continued to spearhead the women’s suffrage movement. She helped direct the feminist journal Time and Tide in the 1920s. 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 work, as well as her own ambivalence about marriage and motherhood (she remained single and childless). Robins has long been studied by theatre historians, feminist studies scholars, and Ibsen specialists and is now receiving attention for her relevance to medical humanities, as her work deals extensively with hereditary disease, euthanasia, women and illness, female alcoholism, biological determinism, and mental disorder. Much scholarship still remains to be done, particularly on her prose fiction and in mining the vast archives of unpublished material in the Fales Collection.