Two on Elizabeth Robins

BOOK REVIEWS sustained studies that actually do the work of making fresh close readings of primary evidence, as occurs for example in the pieces about Richardson, West, Lessing, and Stein. While these selections show an imaginative approach or a breadth of application that should refresh the attention of specialists, the others succumb to problems of inflated rhetoric and skimpy exposition that can make "theory" seem tiresome. jayne Marek ___________ Franklin College of Indiana Two on Elizabeth Robins Joanne E. Gates. Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. xi + 297 pp. $39.95 Angela V. John. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. New York: Routledge, 1995. xiv + 283 pp. $25.00 ASPECTS OF THE COLORFUL career of Elizabeth Robins—the young American widow who came to England in 1889 and achieved renown as an actress and popularizer of Henrik Ibsen's dramas on the London stage, as an accomplished novelist, playwright, and essayist, and as an ardent advocate of women's suffrage and social as well as political equality for women—have been the subject of doctoral dissertations during the 1980s by Jane Connor Marcus, Gay Gibson Cima, Mary T. Heath, and Joanne Gates. In 1989 Susan M. Squier published an interesting study comparing one of Robins's best-known novels, The Convert, and H. G. Wells's In the Days of the Comet. More recently Peter Whitebrook's biography of William Archer revealed (as had Thomas Postlewait previously in his study of Archer) much of Archer's love affair with Robins. Most of these works, as well as the biographical sketches of Robins in almost all of the biographical dictionaries of noteworthy feminists and suffragettes, add to and correct what Elizabeth Robins wrote about herself in such memoirs and reminiscences as Ibsen and the Actress (1928), Theatre and Friendship (1932), Both Sides of the Curtain (1940), and Raymond and 7 (1956). Now Joanne Gates's biography and Angela John's biographical portrait of Robins neatly complement each other mainly because of their distinctive interpretations and emphases on aspects of Robins's life and career. The eldest daughter and child in a family of eight children of Charles Robins, a somewhat feckless banker, and his mentally unstable wife, Hannah Maria, Elizabeth Robins was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at the Putnam Female Seminary. Despite her father's desire 487 ELT 39:4 1996 for Elizabeth to undertake a career in medicine, she became an actress during the early 1880s in travelling theater companies where she met and married the young actor George Richmond Parks in 1885. The marriage was a disaster and ended in the alcoholic Parks's suicide by drowning in 1887. Not long after Parks's demise, Robins left for Norway via England and, following a brief stay in Norway where she became enamoured with the plays of Ibsen, she settled in London. With the help of several male and female friends in the London theater, especially Oscar Wilde, Arthur Pinero, Florence Bell, and Marion Lea, the comely widow soon helped produce Ibsen's dramas on the London stage and achieved much acclaim for her performances portraying the main character in Hedda Gabler during 1891. This time was also the beginning of her romance with Archer who, like such other admirers of Robins as W. T. Stead, Pinero, and William Heinemann, was taken with her charm and beauty. Fearing that her career on the stage might fade (Angela John notes that between 1888 and 1902, Robins appeared in fifty-seven plays), she sought to develop an alternate career as a writer and to establish herself in the late Victorian literary world. With her considerable talent as a writer and the encouragement and influence of Archer, Wilde, Henry James, Stead, and Florence Bell, among others, Robins rapidly achieved renown by writing and producing (in collaboration with Bell) the play Alan's Wife (1893) and with her novel, George Mandeville's Husband, appearing the following year, which dealt with such Victorian taboos as female sexuality, gender competition, and euthanasia. Throughout her life Robins produced fourteen novels (some under the pseudonym "C. E. Raimund"), including the immensely popular The Magnetic North (1904), which was...