Elizabeth Robins

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ER 's political commitment to feminism is evident throughout her plays, novels, travel writing, and essays, in which she addresses issues ranging from women's suffrage to the rest cure and white slave trade. Through much of her writing career (which spanned a decade of the nineteenth century and four decades of the twentieth) she insisted on maintaining anonymity despite pressure from her publishers to capitalize on her fame as an actress.
Black and white photograph of Elizabeth Robins, seated, with one arm resting on the arm of her chair and the other in her lap. She is wearing a dark dress with a high collar and long sleeves, both of which are trimmed with fur, a tall, spreading dark hat probably of feathers, and a long silver chain.

Milestones

6 August 1862

ER was born in Louisville, Kentucky.
Demastes, William W., and Katherine E. Kelly, editors. British Playwrights, 1880-1956. Greenwood Press.
352
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
15

July 1890

The first publication by ER appeared: Across America with Junius Brutus Booth, in The Universal Review.
Gates, Joanne E. “Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952”. The Elizabeth Robins Web: Texts and Contexts.
Chronology

9 April 1907

ER 's suffrage play, Votes for Women (one of the earliest in the genre), was first performed at the Court Theatre .
Stowell, Sheila. A Stage of Their Own. University of Michigan Press.
165
Liggins, Emma. “The ’Sordid Story’ of an Unwanted Child: Militancy, Motherhood, and Abortion in Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women and Way Stations”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
25
, No. 3, pp. 347-61.
350

1942

The Hogarth Press printed, for private circulation only, ER 's Portrait of a Lady, or The English Spirit Old and New, a memoir of Elizabeth Yates Thompson , the shy philanthropist daughter of publisher George Smith , who with her husband endowed the library of Newnham College, Cambridge , in 1897.
Drabble, Margaret. “Amber Reeves (1887 - 1981)”. Breaking Bounds. Six Newnham Lives, edited by Biddy Passmore, Newnham College, pp. 40-51.
50

8 May 1952

ER died in Brighton, at the age of ninety.
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
237

Biography

Birth and Family

6 August 1862

ER was born in Louisville, Kentucky.
Demastes, William W., and Katherine E. Kelly, editors. British Playwrights, 1880-1956. Greenwood Press.
352
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
15

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