Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952

"American expatriate Elizabeth Robins was a remarkable woman of her times. She was more instrumental than any other single performer in the staging of Ibsen plays in England in the 1890s. This study of her life and literary work is the first to benefit from access to the Elizabeth Robins Collection, a treasure trove of personal and family documents, and it demonstrates how thoroughly Robins transformed her own life into literary and dramatic capital."--BOOK JACKET. "Robins wrote about her part in a changing theater world with a sense of female difference. Many unpublished novels and stories reveal how she used her own life as the source of her fiction. She transformed her long personal history of ill-health and poor medical treatment into feminist concerns. At many points in her life, Elizabeth Robins confronted deep, personal crises, and her fiction is marked by a number of true-life components: the formative experiences of her childhood, an actress's coming of age, a husband's flirtation with suicide, a widow's freedom to sacrifice a second romance for independence, and the abuses of the rest cu.