Suffrage Theatre's Surprising Supporters: Elizabeth Robins's Artistic Friendships with Henry James and Florence Bell

Abstract

Actress, novelist, playwright, and essayist Elizabeth Robins is one of the most examined British suffrage writers, and her play Votes for Women (1907) emerged from and participated in robust networks for women's enfranchisement that have been well studied. This essay takes as its focus other contexts that contributed to Robins's suffrage writing, namely her deep and enduring friendships with two people who opposed women's suffrage: the writers Henry James and Lady Florence Bell. Closely examining these connections provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the movement for women's empowerment in the theatre and the movement for women's political enfranchisement. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of Robins's motivations as she herself, like Bell and James, understood her artistic interests to be parallel with yet distinct from, rather than fully elided with, her political causes. These friendships speak to activist theatre's productive contiguities with the more conservative uses of the art forms in which they participate. Robins's correspondence with James and Bell provides us with an understanding of how the political theatre of the suffrage movement was supported by and in turn helped to build relationships across political differences.