Elizabeth Robins playing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891)
Dear friends and readers,
I must interrupt my series of blogs on the ASECS conference to recommend an excellent novel that I read this week: Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907), developed out of her popular play, Votes for Women! When I was told it was a suffragette novel, I expected an overtly didactic text whose central character would be a politically active suffragette, preferably lower middle class; instead I found myself in a subtle realistic novel whose central character is an enigmatic upper middle class woman, Vida Levering, much of whose life (and the action of the novel until its last quarter) takes place in Oscar Wilde like luxurious residences, elite parties, and dinners featuring witty and complex characters. We begin with her visit to a pair of wealthy children, in a lavish nursery whom Vida is visiting and move on to her servant problem: her lady’s maid, gaunt and middle-aged, wants to quit in order to leap at a chance of marriage with a widower, a market gardener she’s never met (who has children for her to care for too). The cover of the first Feminist Press edition conjures up an appropriate image for the heroine:
The image is a reproduction of Cecilia Beaux’s After the Meeting
After a few minutes this did make sense: the leaders of the suffragette movement were often women with connections, money they had some control of, and enough sense of self, of esteem, of their own rights to demand power. If nothing else, who else could find the time to proselytize, organize, work for the vote. Would a poorer woman see the importance of the vote?
We begin seemingly in the world of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, but as we listen on (the text is strongly dramatically imagined) we discover it’s more George Bernard Shaw whom Elizabeth knew fairly well at one point in her life. Interwoven with the upstairs nursery (and very snobbish stern nursery governess) and Vida’s private bedroom, we find ourselves in a political dinner party, on the surface an infinitely more intelligent, nuanced, detailed depiction of the world of Downton Abbey at a dinner, complete with (so much is missing from DA one does not know where to begin) connected politicians and semi-unacceptable people. Little is overtly explained so our curiosity is aroused. As they talk a subtle feminist and even egalitarian slant emerges. While Vida makes the point to the leading politician, Haycroft (probably intended to stand for a Tory prime minister) that the women at this function are enacting a Geisha form of life, amusing the men, there is also much in the scene that most women would want to be and to do: beautifully dressed, well-educated (Wollstonecraft would say they are mis-educated), admired, conversing, moneyed. Robins begins by bringing out the deep difficulty of reforming any society. These privileged women could not begin to see that anything but wealth and position matters, and if that is threatened in any way, it would be difficult to persuade them of the need for feminism — outside the sexual, there you might get them privately to admit to much misery. Every type of woman is gradually put before us in these first chapters. From hostess to guest, widow to a woman seeking a husband, to women trying to marry off daughters, to women seeking position in social pecking orders.
It’s the morning after and we see the home-life of Vida’s sister, Mrs Fox-Moore who was snubbed at the dinner party ad socially pathetic (acceptable only because she had made this good marriage), whom Vida is living with. They are at breakfast and the husband comes downstairs: he is a corrosive quiet tyrant over his wife and makes her life miserable. The point of the chapter is to dramatize how if someone is given full power over someone else he or she will usually use it and in unkind ways. Mrs F-M has a sickly daughter Doris whom the father dotes on — like last night’s company he despises his wife because she does not know how to manipulate others, and is overtly weak before him. We hear ofMrs F-M’s satisfaction from charity work which Vida objects to as what these poor people want is not sermons or entertainment uplifting or not, but real help: solid money to make their life different and opportunities for decent employment. That’s not said but it’s implied. Quite a difference from Dickens’s mockery of Lady Bountfiuls as bullies.
A visit to a Brideshead kind of house: Uland house and its mistress, Lady John — a full description of one of these rich houses and the people in them — some the same individuals we met at the dinner party. I could quite see Diana Quick as Lady Julia as one of these characters (from the 1981 film), as well as Jane Asher, the actress who played the upper class woman Charles Ryder marries, and Jeremy Sinden who played her brother though he is a caricature as Charles Keating, Rex, Julia’s philistine politician husband is not (and could be a characer in The Convert). Robins’s feminism continues by showing us Hermione Heriot who hides the least conventional thought, Lady Sophia who reminds me of Trollope’s Miss Dunstable but not a caricature, there’s a dog Joey, a Lord Borrodaile and Paul Filey presented as unusual and perhaps interesting. When all gather over tea we see Filey is absurd, flattering himself he is not conventional, he has written a useless book defending aesthetics as the basis of life. could this be Robins on Wilde? Filey does not seem Wilde like and is likened to Shelley. What happens is there erupts a discussion of the suffragettes which grates on Vida. Suffragettes are mocked as absurd lunatic disgusting and so on. Vida’s resistant reaction brings out a side of her publicly she had not before: she tells of a scene she saw of unemployed people protesting and a working man who was dragging a rich child on a toy horse on a string; he was the horse for the child. She escapes before she says any more to a garden and then hearing her cousin, Mary, very dull, is not well, hurries off on this excuse to get out of this luxurious set of self-indulgent people who conversation is deliberately mindless. The tone inimitable rich, ironic, it reminds me of Henry James (whom Robins also knew). Robins has one of her characters mention Rhoda Broughton whose I’ve not read but know Trollope recommended and others have. This is the kind of Victorian novel that academic critics sometimes try to turn earlier Victorian women’s novels into.
Well by the center of the novel our two heroines have shown they have social consciences, and their curiosity aroused, they attend a suffragette meeting. Mrs Fox-Moore does not return a second time, but allured and fascinated despite misgivings, Vida does — with her new lady’s maid. Apparently women of the upper or middling classes did not walk alone in the streets if they were conventional. The lead-in to the first meeting showed the police becoming belligerent, derisory, obstructionist to our heroines — who never experienced anything like this before.
The meetings seemed to me to function two ways. Directly the words the suffragettes speak are ways of speaking to the audience of the book. They make the suffragette argument: how miserable are most women’s lives (working long hours, for little pay, endless children) with no power to alter this, while they have to listen to absurd rhetoric about being on pedestals and the like. There are a strong socialist admixture: the speakers all bring out the poverty and abysmal conditions of the working and lower middle class and make the analogy with chartism and men’s movements to gain the vote, and say these were efficacious. There’s now a labor party. The strongest speaker is probably intended to be a mirror of a real women: Emmeline Blunt she’s called.
We are also to experience how hostile crowds were. Most of the time I’ve gone to any political rally the people attending were people for the party. The last time I went to rally with hostile people about were demonstrations against Vietnam. Robins does justice to the kind of withering and abusive rhetoric women were subjected to, how they were mortified by a complete lack of respect. We see how odd their dress: one woman speaking is a widow with four children. She points out when a set of children lose their father they are left with the mother to try to care for them, usually in desperate circumstances and the children have no opportunities. When they lose their mother, they are unless taken in by a family, put to workhouses. Men don’t take their responsibility, will not mother. Most effective is how the women strain, what an emotional strain it is to talk above and against such a crowd. That the women get some respect, are listened to some of the time is remarkable. You see that ridicule was tried against the suffragettes, but the cause, the misery and needs of half the population (and their children suffering with them) was too important so it didn’t work
The first part of the novel was a perspective which showed her ironic realization of the circumstances and realities of her powerless life against men’s desires, wants, needs, demands; children are just fitted in as what men want too. She is now being converted. Amusingly she shows the little daily routines that kept upper class family members in their place. I noticed in Downton Abbey that everyone obeyed the dinner gong. You had to give up so many hours a day to eat and dress for it too. The servants had to cook and serve the meal. The gong in emerges as a technique for repressing and controlling the behavior of the whole household.
A photo of a suffragette demonstration (ca. 1910)
The emphasis in this central and to near the end of the novel is on demonstrations — of course such scenes make for drama but you could have scenes of suffragettes talking together. There is one between a Miss Claxton and Vida Levering, but when it comes time for the woman to tell the story of her life, Robins punts. We get very few details about the misery of ordinary working women’s lives; what she does tell is how when in prison women were somehow treated in a sexually disgraceful, humiliating or mortifying manner. Probably made to endure public overt harassment — it does not sound like rape. They were kicked and heads banged — that’s mentioned. Women did not get the vote until after WW1 in 1918 and in 1828 universal suffrage included women. I know there was no other way to show and try to make your desire felt. Mass demonstrations of men in Ireland and again in London and around England indirectly led to the extension of the franchise — women can’t threaten implicitly in the same way. It’s indirect: men hated to be bothered by women demonstrating, being violent, starving themselves and/or felt embarrassed by the exposure of their own power? But it was not enough: the whole experience of WW1, the breakdown of so many conventions, the death of so many men, had to intervene.
Slowly Vera begins to helping Blunt at demonstrations; coming in with her carriage and helping Blunt or others to flee. She’s followed about by Lord Borrodaile who appears to worry for her physical safety. These scenes are used to make it an astute politically aware novel. The depictions of the speeches include dialogues between Vida and Ernestine Blunt where you see how Robins understood what makes people respond to a political figure and what brings out an effective active response and what people just don’t care about, or refuse to recognize can be changed. Especially good is the mockery of the men — what they say, how what they care about women is their looks and little else. One woman who presents a real intelligent case of how women workers suffer from lethal conditions fails to get any attention as she’s hitting emotions of indifference; another intuitively seeks political power in her speeches and appeals more; a third in ordinary life is fine but up on a bench and she’s perceived intuitively as a weak target and humiliated.
She begins to accompanied by younger upper class women who are idealistic (reminding me of Lady Sybil Crawley): one, Jean, comes with her protective suitor who she is eager not to offend by her behavior, but wants there as a protector as well as for moral support.
As Vida leaves her upper class life, people become willing to talk about her, and fissures open up so the enigmatic feel of the character is explained. It seems that as a young woman Vida “left her father’s house” (the language so reminiscent of Richardson’s Clarissa): was it an attempt at incest? did her father take a mistress openly? it matters. We are not told. A male friend who knew the family and had been kind, seduces and then takes her to live with him. The novel uses coincidence: it was Stonor himself. It seems he pushed her into having an abortion, and it is made plain that she didn’t want the abortion, she regrets it even now. I was surprised to discover that in the turn of the century a woman would talk about a fetus as a baby. I thought that was the result of recent anti-abortion rhetoric, Catholic beliefs that life and a soul start at conception; from the few mentions (but real enough) I have come across in the Renaissance (Veronica Gambara’s letters where she had miscarriages) and later 17th through 18th century, until quickening the pregnancy (not called that) was not thought to be a baby; after quickening few aborted, very dangerous. As I said, these 1890s novels bring out thoughts one never heard at the time (and often do not now). Vida think had she had a child, she’d have more to live for today.
In Daphne Phillips’s Women’s Fiction, 1945-2005 she describes a 1960s type of women’s novel as the single mother novel. These are books where the heroine becomes pregnant outside marriage; in just about all the heroine chooses to have the child and the novel is about the burden and complications and rewards that ensue. Philips says an American survey in 1959 of documentable (middle-class) women who got pregnant outside marriage showed only 2% chose to carry the pregnancy through to birth. Novels described include Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (filmed 1962), Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (filmed 1969 as A Touch of Love), Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (filmed 1967 as Poor Cow).
Well the crown or denouement of the book has Vida getting on the bench herself and speaking publicly. She holds her own. Not that she achieves much that we can see — but it’s an addition, however small; she is a lady getting up there. But its climax, final scene reverses the emphasis back to private life. The last chapter shows the novel’s origin in a play. It reads like some final confrontation in an Ibsen play or Shaw — Vida and Stonor engaged in ahn impassioned debate over their shared past. He feels guilty about what happened, but to him she has become an unacceptable woman; he wants the young woman, Jean, whom he is engaged to be as sheltered as possible and we see while at the demonstration, how she is by training and disposition heeding all he says and will obey him. Unlike Trollope, Stonor does not go on about purity and the “beauty of innocence;” that is the underlying demand, but the overt thing he wants is a dependent woman who does not know how to cope with hard realities alone. We have been told by some of the other upper class women how Vida’s sister made a good marriage; we have seen how she is bullied so the future before Jean may not be any different. Here is our Shavian happy ending. A remarkable book,
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George Moore’s Esther Waters edited by David Skilton
I’ve read only few novels from this era about or by “new women” (emancipated in some way, women who worked for money outside the home) or presenting the realities of the time in new reformist ways: George Moore’s very great Esther Waters (and novella, Albert Nobbs); Anna Lombard by Victoria Cross, a pseudonym used by Anna Sophie Cory, sister to “Laurence Hope,” aka Adela Cory who married and lived in India (where she and Vivian and another sister were born) and wrote popular poetry depicting female sexuality, sensual desire through pseudo-Indian imagery. As I recall in Anna Lombard the heroine pressured into either having an abortion or giving up the baby to caretakers knowing that the baby may be let die — by the husband or man who deigns to marry her; the book seems to endorse the idea that a man is right to refuse to be father to another man’s child and it is somehow unmanly for him to have been involved with her while she was pregnant by another man. What is shameful is he thinks of her as owned by him and orders her to kill a child. Esther Waters in Moore’s novel saves her baby from this at great sacrifice to herself; the pressure is economic and socially; she is regarded as a social outcast. These are books that should be better known. Hence this blog.
These “new woman” novels bring out into the discussably open for the first time realities not discussed even today — or skewed when discussed. So the first time out you can see attitudes blurted out which the person has not learned to hide.
The cover photo for Suffragette Sally (ca. 1910 photo)
Elizabeth Robins’s book is a cross-over between novels which focus on the private sexual lives of women and novels retelling the public world and activities of the suffragettes. A good Broadview edition (with an introduction about the suffragette movement, explaining why they had to resort to violence), Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragette Sally, edited by Alison Lee. One that sounded interesting is “by Lillie Devereux Blake, an American suffragist who wrote a novel, Fettered for life or Lord and Master. Blake wrote this to educate– [as in Mary Wollstonecraft] the emphasis on education — women in how greatly the law was stacked against them in marriage. Blake worried that young women were woefully uninformed about the lack of rights of married women, even in the 1870s. Blake worried that young women were woefully uninformed about the lack of rights of married women, even in the 1870s. Domestic abuse was exerted economically and legally. Blake wanted to show women that they were in great danger from husbands because the law worked from the premise that a husband would protect a wife — therefore, whatever a husband did, even hurting her physically, was seen through the lens of protecting her, keeping her line. Laws protected abuse, so there was no real justice. Also, men could easily circumvent laws as women didn’t know the law and lack finances to sue. To the 19th century suffragist movement, the vote equalled protection from domestic violence and hence from death’ (quoted from a posting by Diane Reynolds to WWTTA).
I’ve sent away (bought through Bookfinder.com) Blake’s novel. To be honest, I am more drawn to the novel of the era which focuses on women’s sexual exploitation.
From the cover of Harman’s Feminine Political Novel: upper class women caged upstairs watching Parliament: Trollope’s Madame Max refuses to go because she is locked out and in
One good book by a single author that studies women’s political novels as such, The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England by Barbara Leah Harman includes Gaskell’s North and South, Robins’s The Convert as well as Bronte’s Shirley. It bothers me that Harman choses to cover Gissing’s The Year of the Jubilee and Meredith’s Diana of the Crossroads — were there no other women’s political novels in the 19th century? What about Henrietta Stanndard’s A Blameless Woman (about a women tricked into bigamy)? Harman with Susan Meyer has edited a collection called The New Nineteenth-Century: Feminist Reading of Underread Victorian Novels: this has good essays on Bronte’s Agnes Grey (a wonderfully bitter book), Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half-Sister, Oliphant’s Miss Majoribanks, Eliza Lynn Lynton’s The Rebel of the Family, Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins, Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward’s Marcella (about a home-visiting nurse) and Sir George Tressady, and Flora Anne Steele’s On The face of the Waters (Anglo-Indian, about rape). There is another essay on Elizabeth Robins’s fiction (she wrote 14 novels altogether, as well as plays), Angela John’s “Radical Reflections: Elizabeth Robins’s “The Making of Suffragette History and the Representation of working Class Women,” and on “Henrietta Stanndard and the Emancipation of Women, 190-1910” by Owen Ashton in The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (wife of E.J., she wrote The Outsiders), Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts. The volume includes “Who wrote The Northern Star?, essays on the experience of the workplace by women, on lunatic asylums (what class person was put in there?), rural resistence, poverty and the poor law, chartism (all suffragette topics).
A familiar photo of Robins at the height of her career and beauty
There are two biographies of Elizabeth Robins: one, Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, takes her long life into her later obscure years.
Elizabeth Robins in later life
The other by Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1852 which appears to center on her central active years as socialite, actress and woman of letters and the theater (her pseudonym was Claire Raymond), suffragette. See comments for Nina Auerbach’s review.
We are on Women Writers through the Ages@ Yahoo (WWTTA) embarked on reading Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. These are Wollstonecraft’s great-great-granddaughters.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Nina Auerbach. From Women’s Review of Books, 1995.
ELIZABETH ROBINS HAUNTED ME as an embodiment of a somewhat chilling integrity during the years I spent lost in theatrical archives, trying to resurrect the beloved and compromised Victorian actress Ellen Terry. A woman without a country, an American expatriate in England, Robins repudiated the life that hobbled her female contemporaries.
Other actresses petted their audiences and toadied to the actor-managers who ruled the late Victorian and Edwardian theatre; Robins flung the iconoclast Ibsen at the cosy London establishment. She not only played the first British Hedda Gabler, Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder, and (following Florence Farr) Rebecca West in Rosmersholm; she was also Ibsen’s producer and his largely unacknowledged translator, absorbing his language into her own. Perhaps because she had become Ibsen’s embodiment, she had the courage to insult those paternalistic protectors of emancipated women, the actor-managers Beerbohm Tree and George Alexander. Not even the freethinking H. G. Wells and the seductively strangling George Bernard Shaw lured her into their images of New Womanhood.
Other actresses aged into anguished obscurity, Robins stopped acting in 1902, when she was forty. At an age when most actresses mourned their lost roles, she sharpened her journalistic eye traveling around Alaska with her prospector brothers; having left the stage, she turned herself into a prolific playwright, novelist, journalist and suffrage champion in and beyond the theatre. Today she is best known for her exhilarating 1907 play, Votes for Women, and its novelization, The Convert. A controversial hit in its time, Votes for Women has scarcely dated. Even without its bravura staging of a suffrage rally, complete with hecklers and oratorical fumbles, it would be one of the sharpest and subtlest political plays ever written.
The vote was won; so were two world wars. When feminism seemed to dissolve, Robins remained a gadfly until her death in 1952, writing with audacious offensiveness about social purity, pacifism, war work for women, women’s need, not only to vote, but to support themselves. In her anonymous, unsuccessful, but prescient Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism (1924) she exposed the comprehensive corrosions of patriarchy on the mind, the spirit, our ways of knowing and articulating experience. Ancilla’s Share may be the first work of feminist theory written in this century. It remains one of the most stinging.
These are only the highlights of Elizabeth Robins’ vigorous life. I have left out everyone she knew, even though her expansive life was inseparable from the people in it. Robins was never one thing for very long: she chafed eve against Ibsen, fearing that if she did not move on, she would be typecast as his woman. Always changing, always taking the initiative, always, it seems, protesting, she moved beyond the other actresses of her generation, for she was a writer too, and she wrote and rewrote her life until the end. Like the Hilda Wangel she played, who goads Ibsen’s Master Builder to climb beyond his power, Elizabeth Robins is a rather cruel inspiration, for she did what other women found impossible: she made her life her own.
When Robins was intimidating and galvanizing me in the mid-1980s, she was all the more formidable because she existed primarily as feminist legend: no biography had yet been written. That extraordinary life was hidden in a messy series of boxes. Most of the boxes are in the Fales Library at New York University, but–like those of so many women, theatrical and otherwise–Robins’ papers are scattered in archives around the world writing about such women is a Frankensteinian task of traveling, assembling body parts and stitching them into what one hopes is a human being.
IN RECONSTRUCTING THIS LIFE, Angela V. John and Joanne E. Gates have given us a prize. I began their biographies fearing Robins would be psychoanalyzed or deconstructed or otherwise diminished, but she has not been. Now that I know more about her than I did, she is still, for me, Hilda Wangel as she appears in the frontispiece of John’s bock, dressed in clumsy Victorian Alpine costume, looking up with a little scowl away from the earthbound viewer.
These biographies provide a tantalizing but unfinished sketch of Robins’ mobile life. They should be read together, for they are complementary, not competing. I advise the reader to begin with Gates and then go on to John. Gates (an American professor of English) tells a chronologically intelligible story, while John (a British professor of history), though a more intense and probing analyst than Gates, chooses a thematic organization that muddles her time-line: she scarcely hints, for instance, that Robins wrote novels at the same time as she was playing Ibsen, for she covers each incarnation in a separate chapter. Gates leads us from point to point; John bangs some thematic depth to Robins’ many lives.
Even when road together, though, these biographies are slight. Both lack context and canvas; neither does justice to Robins’ growth (especially her political growth) over the ninety years she lived as a resident of two countries. Both books are fatally short. Both put Robins’ dates, 1862-1952, in their subtitles, calling proud attention to their subject’s long life, but each book is under 300 pages, hardly enough room for so busy a creature. Neither explores the interaction of Robins’ life with war and social change (she was born during the American Civil War and died in the British countryside in the quiet years after World War Two). Neither tells us enough about her lovers and friends: fascinating characters like William Archer, John Masefield and Octavia Wilberforce, who were probably lover-friends, figure largely as they pertain to Robins. There are snippets of love letters and some tentative sexual speculation, but we rarely see others’ lives and work affecting hers.
All women deserve more room than we are given, but Elizabeth Robins is especially constricted by her biographers because she refused to choose a role. She remained simultaneously English and American: Henry James became a British citizen during the First World War, but Robins never did. In the same spirit, she oscillated between her roles as actress and writer, retaining her theatrical ties even after she had left the stage. As a writer, she encompassed all modes from the undeclared irresoluteness James and his fellow aesthetes called art to invigorating, incisive polemic: Votes for Women is political theatre at its rousing best, while its novelization The Convert simulates (or parodies?) a Jamesian novel. The Convert is more ambivalent and delicate than Votes for Women, but it is also, I think, duller. It does, however, entitle critics made nervous by conviction to call its author an artist.
EVEN AT TIE PEAK of her suffrage years, Robins tempered her mission and her identity, retaining gracious influence among the entrenched anti-feminists of Edwardian high society. Her dual roles made her a useful emissary between worlds; no doubt they also made her, at times, a spy in each. When the suffrage movement progressed into militancy–and theatricality!–she backed off, turning to social purity issues: her white slavery novel, My Little Sister (1913; titled in England Where Are You Going To?), inaugurated a new, possibly more traditional activist stage.
Robins’ movement from progressive combat to a defense of chastity some would call retrograde is a development familiar to feminists today, but Robins wore her two hats more comfortably than most of us: she always leavened her traditionalism with challenge, even with shock. In the nineteen-teens and -twenties, when official feminism was complicit with white supremacy, Robins turned her activist attention to American racism. She maintained simultaneous friendship with W.E.B. Du Bois and Harold Nicolson, who, with his imperial wife Vita Sackville-West, would flirt comfortably with Nazism in the 1930s. Unfortunately but typically, we learn nothing about these relationships, for both Gates and John merely list the names of Robins’ friends without proceeding to personal and ideological analysis.
A radical and a traditionalist at once, Robins was also a wife and no wife, a mother and no mother. In 1885, she married a temperamental actor, George Parks, though they spent most of their marriage on separate tours. In 1887, George drowned himself, weighted down with armor from the costume room. Robins wrote plangently of their unborn child, hinting at an abortion or miscarriage. Whether George’s suicide haunted her or whether she left it behind, it allowed her to ply a wife without having to be one; the mysterious lost baby (if one existed) licensed her to write intensely about motherhood without experiencing it.
Neither John nor Gates seems ease with this flamboyant material: John’s evocative analysis seems to suggest that marriage was one experience among many, while Gates claims (implausibly, I think) that Robins remained celibate thereafter, faithful to the husband she had scarcely seen. Neither biographer brings Robins into sharp enough focus for the reader to draw her own conclusions.
And neither biography has room to do more than summarize Robins’ 21 published novels and plays, all obscure today, or describe somewhat breathlessly her 34 books of non-fiction and her reams of unpublished plays, fiction, essays, memoirs and diaries. Though virtually all this material is unpublished or out of print, both biographies are surprisingly stingy with their quotes. When we do hear Robins’ voice, it leaps beyond her story, but to know her, we need more. Did space limitations constrain John and Gates from quoting freely, or are Robins’ executors ungenerous?
When I consider so large a life crammed (twice!) into so confined a space, I don’t know whether to resent Robins’ biographers, their publishers, or some larger predetermined misogynist conspiracy. I surely resent Robins’ male contemporaries and friends, whose thinner lives are consecrated in multivolume shrines. Henry James dilates his sensibility over five large volumes of Leon Edel’s classic life. Michael Holroyd gives Lytton Strachey two volumes (recently compressed into one outsize book). Holroyd has also endowed George Bernard Shaw with four volumes to date. Robins saw and was more than they; she wrote at least as much, much of it of great interest. Who made the decision to confine her in small and self-effacing spaces? Neither Angela John nor Joanne Gates does justice to her entanglements with history, with art and with love’s variations. A rare actress who became most of the people she imagined, Elizabeth Robins deserves a biography as ample and ambitious as her changing life.
Landmark books by women: The criteria would be they should be recognized at the time, be fundamental in a real sense, and have lasted. The recognition factor is a hard one so George Eliot’s important review-essay on Madame de Sable’s letters won’t be included though it is a work which discussed how women enter literature even when not writing (talk, salons), identifies the first feminist works (later 17th century women), but it is not recognized .Maybe its title and purpose put people off. Instead the profoundly anti-feminist debunking of women’s novels is cited continually; I wish she had gone on to debunk the absurdities of men’s books, their typical plots which are still with us (starting with Gil Blas on the one hand and Wilkie Collins on the other).
So the first,
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication
Then I don’t know enough but is there a work by a suffragette or leader of the first wave that is fundamental and read. The movement to have the vote was heroic, the women leading it suffered terribly (from force feeding to at least emotional torture in prison, some died), but my sense is quite a number of the central figures wrote only impersonally.
Woolf’s A room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex
There is an outpouring in the 1970s.
A few I would single out:
Carole Pateman’s The Social Contract
Catherine MacKinnon’s Feminism Unmodified (several of her essays)
bell hooks — ain’t I a woman?
Ann Oakley — Subject Women (it’s British and maybe not sufficientliy recognized in the US — about how women once educated get nowhere much, about women and jobs)
Ellen Willis — Beginning to see the light (I’m not sure about this either, but it is the equivalent of Marx, she showed the centrality of gender in all social and political arrangements)
Gubar and Gilbert — the Madwoman in the attic (goes well beyond literature)
Christa Wolff — Cassandra and Four Essays
Just on literature and film:
Laura Mulvey on the male gaze (on film, an essay)
Ellen Moers — Literary Women
Elaine Showalter — A Literature of their own
Germaine Greer — The Female Eunuch (widely read at first), The Obstacle Race (still central to art history), The change (rare book on older women)
Molly Haskell — From Reverence to Rape
Modleski — Loving with a vengeance
As to psychology, women have been ill served for the most part — yes they have. A wealth of anti-feminist books beginning with the well-meaning Karen Horney’s Feminine Psychology (a much read and quoted book, probably better known generally today than Woolf’s — for real) — where the theory women are masochistic is central. I’d place Genlis’s books in the anti-feminist camp though she would not agree with me there. Books like Lilian Federman’s which deny lesbian women had sex; this ploy or belief mars Janet Todd’s literary work
There are histories, one that is read and used; Hufton’s The prospect before her; Janet Todd’s compendiums of women’s lives. Some on particular eras — like the history married women’s property act (Holcombe’s Women and Property)
Trying for it but coming at a time of severe reaction — after 1990
Susan Faludi — Backlash
Emma Donogue — Passions Between Women — an attempt at outlining forms of lesbianism as recognizable
Piper Saving Ophelia
Narrow issues — books I think spectacularly good: Peggy Sandy — Gang Rape (about fraternities too), Patricia Pearson — when she was bad (the actual patterns of violence women manifest). But the second is packaged badly and came very late.
One response has been to become very judicious and technical — Michelle Fine’s work on disabled and traumatized women (from sex and class)
I asked myself, did the writer go to the fundamental issues — among which what is wanted is a revolution in the way sexuality is conducted as well as the way the world’s goods are said to belong to individuals? Was the work influential at the time? I also included, did the woman really add knowledge — all those histories of literature, compendiums, these are invaluable in making available to women what is there, what was their history, forging (as I wrote in my CFP) connections.
Books that are not cited in histories of literature and handbooks are forgotten. Texts left out of anthologies disappear — because anthologizer repeat one another. It’s the rare editor that goes back to manuscripts to chose different texts or find other authors unless that is the point of the anthology or someone “new” has risen to the public attention.
To make the list longer I also included books on narrower areas of knowledge that I know and thought mattered: like histories of women’s novels, poetry, plays, memoirs.
It is sad because some works which were influential at the time and fundamental and even still known among feminists are losing attention, being erased. I believe that includes Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Germaine Greer’s books precisely because they are so fundamental. It’s Jane and George not Jane, George, and Virginia, much less, Germaine.
My list is skewed as it is so English-reading and speaking orientated but I did have The Second Sex which is as monumentally important as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication
E.M.
You might enjoy reading Stephen Crane’s first-rate novel Maggie: A Girl of the Sreets (A Tale of New York), written in 1893.
Bob
My suffrage literature anthology, Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature 1846-1946, samples some amazing fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography, including some scenes from Robins’ VOTES FOR WOMEN and other British materials that inspired US suffragists.
My monograph, Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism, may also interest some of your readers.
I really enjoyed your Elizabeth Robins essay – thank-you so much for sharing your thoughts & understanding so well … Keep at it! Mary Wollstonecraft would be pleased!
Kind regards – Ruth R