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Elizabeth Robins (August 6, 1862 – May 8, 1952) was an actress, playwright, novelist, and suffragette. She also wrote as C. E. Raimond.
/ref> After financial difficulties, her father left for Colorado, leaving the children in the care of their mother. When Hannah Crow was committed to an Lunatic asylum, Elizabeth and the other children were sent to live with her grandmother in Zanesville, Ohio, where she was educated. It would be her grandmother who armed her with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and her unconditional support on her endeavor to act in New York City. Her father was a follower of Robert Owen and held progressive political views. Though her father was an insurance broker, he traveled a lot during her childhood and in the summer of 1880, Robins accompanied him to mining camps and was able to attend theatre in New York and Washington along the way. Because of her intelligence, Elizabeth was one of her father's favorite children. He wanted her to attend Vassar College and study medicine. At the age of fourteen, Robins saw her first professional play ( Hamlet) which ignited her desire to pursue an acting career. From 1880 to 1888, she would have an acting career in America.
At a social gathering during her first week in England, Robins met Oscar Wilde. Throughout her career, he would come see her act and give her critiques, such as in one of her roles in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1889. Wilde's comment was "you have definitely asserted your position as an actress of the first order. Your future on our stage is assured."
Early in her time in London, Robins became enamored with the plays of Henrik Ibsen. In 1891 a London matinee revival of A Doll's House put Robins in contact with Marion Lea. Together they would form a joint management, making this the "first step toward the theatre that Robins had dreamed of … a theatre of independent management and artistic standards." Finding work in "'women's plays' written by men like Ibsen," Robins and Lea brought strong female characters to the stage. George Bernard Shaw noted "what is called the Woman Question has begun to agitate the stage."Powell, Kerry. Women and Victorian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print. Together Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea brought Ibsen's Hedda Gabler to the stage for the first time ever in England. A Doll's House "marked an important step in the representation of women by dramatists" and Hedda marked an important step for Elizabeth Robins, becoming her defining role. "Sarah Bernhardt could not have done it better," wrote William Archer in a publication of The World. From then on, Hedda became synonymous with Robins on the English stage. Robins and Lea would go on to produce a handful of Ibsen's other 'New Woman' plays. "The experience of acting and producing Ibsen's plays and the reactions to her work helped transform Elizabeth over time into a committed supporter of women's rights."John, Angela. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life 1862–1952. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. In 1898, she joined forces with William Archer, an influential critic, and together they produced non-profit Ibsen plays. She became known in Britain as "Ibsen's High Priestess."
In 1902, Robins played Lucrezia in Stephen Phillips's Paolo and Francesca at the St. James's Theatre, London. Ending her acting career at the age of forty, Robins had made her mark on the English stage as not only an actress but an actress-manager.
In her biography of Elizabeth Robins, Staging a Life, Angela V. John says, "It is possible to trace in Elizabeth's writing from 1890s onwards an emerging Feminism critique, clearly, but only partly, influenced by the psychological realism of Ibsen, which would find most confident expression in 1907 in her justly celebrated novel "The Convert". Robins's main character, Vida, speaks to "male politicians and social acquaintances",John, Angela. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life: 1862–1952. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. something very different from what the women of Robins's time did – something very reminiscent of one of Ibsen's 'new women.' The novel is an adaptation of Robins's most successful play, Votes for Women! The first play to bring the "street politics of women's suffrage to the stage", Votes for Women! led to a surge of suffrage theatre. Elizabeth Robins first attended "open-air meetings of the suffrage union" when the Women's Social and Political Union moved its headquarters from Manchester to London in 1906. It was then that she "abandoned" the current play she was writing and worked to complete the very first suffrage drama. "The more Robins became immersed in the work, the more she became converted to the cause".Kelly, Katherine E., ed. Modern Drama by Women, 1880s-1930s; an International Anthology. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Robins remained an active feminist throughout her life.Jusova, Iveta. 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. In the 1920s she was a regular contributor to the feminist magazine, Time and Tide. She also continued to write books such as Ancilla's Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, which explored the issues of sexual inequality. She collected and edited speeches, lectures, and articles dealing with the women's movement, some of which had never previously appeared in print (Way Stations, published by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1913).
Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, 1st Baron Pethick-Lawrence credited Robins with explaining to him the difference between a suffragette and a suffragist.Introduction to Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life: 1862–1952
Robins was involved in the campaign to allow women to enter the House of Lords. Her friend, Margaret Haig, was the daughter of Viscount Rhondda. He was a supporter of women's rights and in his will made arrangements for Margaret to inherit his title. This was considered radical, as women did not normally inherit peerage titles. When Rhondda died in 1918 the House of Lords refused to allow Margaret, now the Viscountess Rhondda, to take her seat. Robins wrote numerous articles on the subject, but the House of Lords refused to change its decision. It was not until 1958 that women were first admitted to the House.
In 1900 Robins traveled alone to the gold rush camps of Alaska in search of her favorite brother Raymond Robins, whom she feared was lost in the Yukon. After a long and arduous journey, she located Raymond in Nome. She shared his life in wild and lawless Alaska throughout the summer of 1900. Her adventures were not without cost – the typhoid fever she contracted at that time compromised her health for the rest of her life. Robins's tales about Alaska provided material for a number of articles she sent on to London for publication. Her best selling book, The Magnetic North, is an account of her experiences, as is The Alaska-Klondike Diary of Elizabeth Robins.
Although Robins rejected her father's plans for her to be educated as a doctor, she retained a strong interest in medicine. In 1909 she met Octavia Wilberforce, the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, a leader of the British abolitionist movement. Octavia was a young woman whose desire to study medicine was thwarted by a family which viewed intellectualism and professional careers as 'unsexing' for women. When Wilberforce's father refused to pay for her studies and disinherited her for pursuing them, Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she became a doctor. While some have conjectured that Robins and Wilberforce were romantically involved, this has never been supported by scholarly material available about either woman, nor is it borne out by their own writings. Available evidence points to Robins and Wilberforce enjoying a relationship much like that of mother and daughter. In her declining years Robins developed a friendship with Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Dr Wilberforce looked after Robins until her death in 1952, just months shy of her 90th birthday.
As C. E. Raimond, she wrote:
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