Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life

The career of Elizabeth Robins spanned writing, producing, directing and acting; most importantly, the works of Ibsen. Drawing on Robins's diary, letters, drafts of novels, reviews and many other sources, Angela John's portrait demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of Elizabeth Robins' life.

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A woman of extraordinary energy, talent and versatility. Elizabeth Robins was an actress who popularised Ibsen on the British stage, a prolific and popular writer of novels and non-fiction, and an Edwardian suffragette. Her extensive circle of friends included Florence Bell, Henry James, John Masefield and William Archer. She worked with the Pankhursts and knew the Woolfs. Through examining the life and work of this vivid and transatlantic figure born during the American Civil War yet surviving into the England of the 1950s, Angela John raises questions about the shaping of historical identities.
Situating Elizabeth Robins's achievement in the context of the British and American cultural history of the period, this is a book which will attract historians, teachers and students of theatre studies and all those fascinated by biography.