Elizabeth Robins - Personal Life

Personal Life

A beautiful woman, Robins was pursued by many men. She admitted to a deep attraction to her close friend, the highly respected literary critic and fellow Ibsen scholar, William Archer. As a married man Archer was unavailable, however. Except for her brief marriage to George Parks, she remained a fiercely independent single woman. Highly intelligent, she was welcomed into the cream of London's literary and artistic circles, enjoying friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, as well as a tempestuous romantic (but probably non-physical) relationship with the much younger future poet laureate John Masefield.

In 1900 she traveled alone to the gold rush camps of Alaska in search of her favorite brother Raymond Robins whom she feared was lost in the Yukon. After a long and arduous journey, she located Raymond in Nome. She shared his life in wild and lawless Alaska throughout the summer of 1900. Her adventures were not without cost – the typhoid fever she contracted at that time compromised her health for the rest of her life. Robins's tales about Alaska provided material for a number of articles she sent on to London for publication. Her best selling book, The Magnetic North, is an account of her experiences, as is The Alaska-Klondike Diary of Elizabeth Robins.

Although she rejected her father's plans to be educated as a doctor, she retained a strong interest in medicine. In 1909 she met Octavia Wilberforce, a young woman whose fervent desire to study medicine was thwarted by a family that felt intellectualism and professional careers were 'unsexing' for women. When Wilberforce's father not only refused to pay for her studies, but disinherited her for pursuing them, Robins and other friends provided financial and moral support until she became a physician. While some have conjectured that Robins and Wilberforce were romantically involved, such insinuation has never been supported by the considerable scholarly material available about both women, nor is it born out in their own copious written material. All evidence points to Robins and Wilberforce enjoying a relationship much like that of mother and daughter. In her declining years she developed a friendship with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Dr Wilberforce, the great-granddaughter of William Wilberforce, the British emancipator of slaves, looked after Robins until her death in 1952, just months shy of her 90th birthday.