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Cover of Women's Suffrage Literature

Women's Suffrage Literature

Edited by Katharine Cockin; Glenda Norquay; Sowon S. Park

  • Published: 11 Nov 2004
  • DOI: 10.4324/9780415357449
  • Set ISBN: 9780415357449

Set Contents

Writing for the Vote


When Virginia Woolf invited Elizabeth Robins to a performance of Ibsen’s The Master Builder in the latter’s later years, Robins apparently demurred, protesting, ‘I’m Hilda. I’m the person it was written for’. This account offers a glimpse into the crowded and compartmentalised life of the actress, novelist and feminist campaigner. Identifying herself with the quintessential Ibsen heroine might seem excessive but it was quite justified. In the 1890s Robins epitomised the Ibsenite New Woman in the public imagination, with a succession of hit roles from Hedda to Hilda behind her. Her admirers included Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and William Archer; G. B. Shaw was so impressed by one performance that he concurred with her self-identification, proclaiming, ‘Miss Robins was Hilda’. But her reply to Woolf laid claim not only to the role of Hilda with its associated public glory but also to the material history of its production, in which she played a crucial part. Although it is still largely unacknowledged, Robins herself procured The Master Builder in instalments as they were being published in Noray, co-translated and produced it. For in Ibsen she had found an objective embodiment of her convictions which had become deep-rooted even before her London success and which were still intact forty-five years after she retired from the stage. Rather than being merely a populariser or a vehicle for Ibsen, Robins lived her life as a manifestation of Ibsenite ideas, long before being aware of his work, and nowhere more so than in her suffrage years. It is therefore noteworthy that this eminent actress, the New Woman par excellence, the freethinking American Abroad, was an opponent of women’s suffrage until shortly before writing the pro-suffrage novel, The Convert (1907). In November 1905, Robins was asked to enter a debate on Women’s Suffrage as an anti-suffragist. By thinking the debate through, she slowly became convinced of the justice of the cause. Votes for Women, the play which became the novel The Convert, was conceived when Gertrude Kingston asked Robins to write a piece that would demonstrate that the Vote was a right for everyone. Though by this time Robins had become sympathetic to the cause, she was also doubtful about the efficacy of their methods. As she wrote to Mrs Fawcett, ‘the women who work on “constitutionalist” lines cannot always reach and stir the larger public’. Robins sought to direct the aims of the suffrage campaign away from those of the constitutionalist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies led by Mrs Fawcett, in favour of persuading the ‘women of influence to understand what is at stake’.

Volume Contents

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    Front Matter
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    Introduction to Volume I By Katharine Cockin; Glenda Norquay; Sowon S. Park
  • The Convert
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      Elizabeth Robins, The Convert (London: Methuen, 1907) By Elizabeth Robins
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        Chapter I
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        Chapter II
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        Chapter III
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        Chapter IV
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        Chapter V
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        Chapter VI
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        Chapter VII
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        Chapter VIII
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        Chapter IX
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        Chapter X
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        Chapter XI
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        Chapter XII
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        Chapter XIII
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        Chapter XIV
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        Chapter XV
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        Chapter XVI
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        Chapter XVII
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        Chapter XVIII
  • Votes for Women
    • Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women (London: Mills & Boon, 1909) By Elizabeth Robins
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        Act I: Hall of Wynnstay House
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        Act II
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        Act III