Elizabeth Robins Pennell - First Book, Marriage, Move To London

First Book, Marriage, Move To London

Her first book was the first full-length biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) since the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published by her widower William Godwin a few months after Wollstonecraft's death. This biography drew on three main sources: Godwin's Memoirs; a London publisher named C. Kegan Paul, who had written a sketch about the husband and wife a few years previously; and a curator at the British Library, Richard Garnett. It was published in 1884 by the Roberts Brothers of Boston, as part of their Famous Women series, and also in London by the Walter Scott Publishing Company.

In June that year, Elizabeth Robins married Joseph Pennell. The couple accepted a travel writing commission from The Century Magazine and set off for Europe, making several cycling journeys, in 1884 from London to Canterbury and then in 1885 through France. Her uncle had travelled widely in Europe and settled in London, and so did the Pennells, basing themselves in the British capital for more than thirty years, with frequent visits to the Continent. They made a good working team, producing many articles and books together, and supporting each other in their work. For many years they opened their home on Thursday evenings as a literary and artistic salon; some of the people who enjoyed their hospitality included: "critics Sir Edmund Gosse and William Archer; artists Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeil Whistler; authors Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw; and publishers John Lane and William E. Henley." Pennell wrote of these gatherings in her memoirs, Our House and the People in It (1910), Our House and London Out of Our Windows (1912), and Nights: Rome & Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties, London & Paris in the Fighting Nineties (1916).