Elizabeth Robins

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Elizabeth Robins
HS Mendelssohn: Elizabeth Robins
Aimé Dupont : Elizabeth Robins

Elizabeth Robins (born August 6, 1862 in Louisville , Kentucky ; died May 8, 1952 in Brighton , England) was an American actress, writer, and suffragette.

Life

Elizabeth Robins was the eldest daughter of insurance agent Charles Ephraim Robins and Hannah Mary Crow. A younger brother was the economist Raymond Robins (1873–1964). Robins and her siblings grew up temporarily with their father's mother in Zanesville, Ohio . She began an acting career in New York City at the age of 18 and toured coast to coast in 1882 with a group of actors led by Edwin Booth . In 1883 she joined the Boston Museum Company, where she met actor George Richmond Parks, and they married in 1885. While she received other roles and engagements, his career stagnated. Parks committed suicide in 1887, citing his failure as the reason. Robins left the USA in 1888 and moved to England permanently.

During the first week in London she met Oscar Wilde at a meeting of socialists . Wilde took a lively interest in her further acting career. She also made friends with George Bernard Shaw and Henry James , and later with John Masefield .

With the actress Marion Lea, Robins brought several plays by Henrik Ibsen on stage, for example the English premiere of Hedda Gabler in April 1891 , and from then on she was considered the ideal cast for the title role in London theater critics. Robins also played Hedda at the American premiere in New York City in 1898. In 1892 she played Hilde in William Archer's translation of Master Builder Solness . In 1898 she founded the New Century Theater with Archer. At the age of forty, she ended her career as an actress and theater manager in 1902.

In 1894 Robins published her first novel under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond . CE Raimond's identity was revealed after the success with the novel The Open Question . Robins published a total of fourteen novels and two volumes of short stories. In 1900, she embarked on an expedition to Alaska, where her brothers Saxton and Raymond were thought missing in the Klondike gold rush . She tracked them down and lived with Raymond for a while in the wilderness, but fell ill with typhus . Her newspaper reports and her reportage novel The magnetic north , published in 1904 , and Come and Find Me in 1908 , found adventurous readers. With Raymond Robins she bought the Chinsegut estate in Florida in 1904 and stayed there several times. Robins bought a 15th century house in Backsettown near Henfield in England in 1909 . There she took on Octavia Wilberforce (1888-1963), who supported her in her decision to study medicine against her parents' wishes. In 1913, the two of them cared for the suffragettes there, exhausted from the hunger strike. The house was converted into a rest home for women in 1927, and Robins moved to Wilberforce in Brighton, where she practiced as a doctor.

Robins became a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and also of the more radical Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), of which she was a board member from 1907 and 1912, but in whose violent actions she did not want to participate. She was also president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League, founded in 1908 . Thanks to her acting training, she was able to perform as a public speaker and thanks to her talent for writing, she was able to write pamphlets and newspaper articles. In 1907 she wrote Votes for Women! a play that brought women's suffrage to the stage for the first time, with The Convert , the book to the play followed.

Robins wrote regularly for Time and Tide in the 1920s . She campaigned publicly for her friend Margaret Haig , who as the daughter of Viscount Rhondda had inherited his place in the House of Lords , but the Lords refused to accept a woman into their ranks.

During the Second World War, she avoided the United States, but flew back to England at the age of 88. Robins kept a diary since 1876, and the 70 surviving volumes are in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University .

Fonts (selection)

Votes for Women (1907)
CE Raimond
  • George Mandeville's Husband , 1894
  • The New Moon , 1895
  • Below the Salt , 1896
  • The Open Question , 1898
Elizabeth Robins
  • The Alaska-Klondike diary of Elizabeth Robins . 1900
    • VJ Moessner, JE Gates (ed.): The Alaska – Klondike diary of Elizabeth Robins, 1900 . 1999
  • The magnetic north . 1904
  • A Dark Lantern , 1905
  • Votes for Women! . 1907
  • The convert . Novel. 1907
  • Come and Find Me , 1908, follow-up novel to The magnetic north
  • The Florentine Frame , 1909
  • Way Stations . Anthology. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913
  • Camilla , 1918
  • The Messenger , 1920
  • Ancilla's share: an indictment of sex antagonism . Polemics, anonymous, 1924
  • Ibsen and the Actress . Essay. Hogarth Press , 1928
  • Theater and Friendship . 1932
  • Both sides of the curtain . Heinemann, 1940
Film adaptations
  • My Little Sister (1919)
  • A Dark Lantern (1920)

literature

  • Angela V. John: Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862–1952 ; Stroud: Tempus, 2007
  • Angela V. John: Robins, Elizabeth , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004
  • 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 . Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1994
  • Elizabeth Robins , in: Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States . London: Viking, 1997 ISBN 0-670-87420-5 , p. 629
  • Pat Jalland (Ed.): Octavia Wilberforce: The Autobiography of a Pioneer Woman Doctor . London: Cassel, 1989 ISBN 0-304-32230-X
  • Carole Hayman: How the vote was won, and other suffragette plays . London New York: Methuen, 1985 ISBN 0413583805

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hayman Selig Mendelssohn, 1848–1908, photographer in Newcastle
  2. ^ Vita according to ODNB
  3. ^ Raymond Robins , at: spartacus
  4. ↑ The house purchase is documented at ODNB. For information for the Wikipedia reader: en: Chinsegut Hill Manor House in the English Wikipedia, there also a photo of the property.
personal data
SURNAME Robins, Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actress, writer and suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Louisville (Kentucky)
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1952
Place of death Brighton