Notes to WAY STATIONS by Elizabeth Robins

Notes to Way Stations

by Elizabeth Robins

Prepared by Joanne E. Gates

This published work of Elizabeth Robins has public domain status, as it was publilshed prior to 1923. Permission to format the text for the internet was secured by the then literary executor, Mabel Smith.

Electronic formatting, introductions, annotations and hyptertext versions are copyright Joanne E. Gates. (Many thanks to Linda Casey for a keen eye in locating typos, which are now incorporated.) The texts at this site may be used for unpublished research and for distribution in classrooms as long as they are made available in unaltered form.

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Or write to:
Dr. Joanne Gates, English Department, Stone Center
Jacksonville State University, 700 Pelham Rd. N.
Jacksonville, AL 36265 USA

CITATION. Use the following format for MLA style citation of this edition:

Author. Title. Print publication, and URL of the site; editor [Joanne E. Gates], title, text chapter(s); the date of the last update and the date the document was retrieved; and URL of the specific text.

Table of Contents

The Dodd Mead copy text has unnumbered "Contents" pages. Note these corrections:

At Chapter XIII, The Women Writers at the Criterion, the correct date is May 23, 1911.

Woman's War. In the original table of contents, "Woman's War" was misprinted as "Woman's Way," but the original McClure's article and bottom of page note for the start of the essay on p. 349, give authority for the change here to its correct title, "Woman's War."

6.

serried: crowded or dense, pressed together.

16.

The quotation is attributed to St. Chrysostom, A.D. 347-407, Archbishop of Constantinople, with reference to his views on women endorsed by church fathers: "a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill!"

42.

All the world's a stage: See Jaques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, II, vii:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

as well as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, I, i:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

48.

ineluctable: irresistible; impossible to avoid; inevitable.

54.

put away childish things. From 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

99.

The epigraph is from Mathew 13: 2-3.

117-118.

The quotations are from line 90 and lines 139-40 of William Wordsworth's "Laodamia," c. 1813-1814.

185.

slings and arrows: from Hamlet's famous soliloquy in III, i:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

201.

Shall Women Work

The Fortnightly Review printing of May 1910 is available in this Imaged Text, from HathiTrust archive. Robins notes in her diary of 1 February 1909, "Begin Shall Women Work." Her entry for 23 February 1909 includes: "Lecture St. James Hall SHALL WOMEN WORK. It goes well." This hall would be the second St. James; the first was demolished in 1907. Later it was renamed the Philharmonic and then Brock House. Elsewhere in Way Stations, she mentions it was used frequently for WSPU meetings. Robins also noted her progress on the essay in diary notes. On February 5, "Work at lecture." On the ninth, "recast and begin to rewrite lecture"; February 15: "copy and trying to learn lecture." These dates provide an accuracy to the composition that is stronger than the discussion of it in my biography. They are consistent with other evidence that Robins saw the occasions of her speeches like those by one who prepares as an actress prepares. (According to a listing of events published in Votes for Women, 26 March, 1909, page 470, second column, Robins was scheduled to deliver "Shall Women Work?" again at Bristol in the "Small Victoria Rooms" on April 1 at 8:00 p.m. However, her diary does not verify this. She made the move from Blythe to Backsettown at this time.) One factor that complicates the sequencing of articles within Way Stations is that this essay is composed and delivered more than a full year before publication in the Fortnightly. Though this essay is placed after her longer piece, "Why?" she would not compose "Why?" until more than a year later, in March and April 1910. It becomes clear from the interspersed "Time Tables" that she chooses the later publication date and not the lecture's date of delivery as an appropriate placement for "Shall Women Work?" As also noted in this imaged text from the Fortnightly printing, the copyright on the first page of the edition (p. 899) states it is copyrighted in the USA, 1909. I am unable to locate the Metropolitan printing. Researchers might find it interesting that a close acquaintance of Robins, William Archer, published in the same issue of the May 1910 Fortnightly his essay, "The American Cheap Magazine." Although Archer objected to Robins being diverted from her literary fiction by her activities for the suffrage cause, he may have been advising her closely on part of his argument here, that American magazines could pay much higher sums to their authors than could the British periodicals. At any rate, Robins' frequent publications in the American press facilitated the shared purpose of British and American suffrage advocacy, as further detailed in Jane Marcus' essay, "Transatlantic Sisterhood" (1978).

214.

For men must work: Attributed to Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), The Three Fishers.

228.

The article version, stated as published in Votes for Women, is Sue Thomas Bibliography number 180. It is available at the LSE web site. To access the image of this article, go to the issue folder at London School of Economics archive, https://lse-atom.arkivum.net/uklse-dl1wr030150040032. Click on the image twice to get the PDF, then scroll four images down on the right for page 755. 

To access the images of the issue directly, use the direct address for the 12 August 1910 issue. That first printed version takes up one entire page. It is missing seven paragraphs near the end of the essay, starting at this Way Stations version on the top of page 236 "One small effect" and ending on 237 after "take note of these straws." The final paragraphs, starting with "If the recipient" are the same for each publication. The paragraphs unique to this Way Stations printing constitute the incident of the women shopper so upset that elderly sandwichmen are in the streets bearing signs "Women do NOT want the vote" that she pays the WSPU office for a counter advertisement, causing the men carrying anti-suffragist signs to disappear. Perhaps it was cut from Robins' manuscript submission. Perhaps this incident occurred after the journal publication. It is likely that Robins knew of the incident more intimately than she writes of here. It was not uncommon for Robins to write of herself in the third person.

A few diary entries at the time of composition and completion are noteworthy. Robins records on 1 August 1910, "Finish Mr. Partington's Mop. Post to C.P." [Christabel Pankhurst]. On August 7, "Receive and return proof Mr. Partington's Mop for Votes." Robins was juggling a good deal else during these days. There are hints that she was preparing for Christabel to visit her in Sussex, and of her working on a review of Gertrude Bell's Travels in the Arabian Peninsula, not published until 1911. Moreover, near this time she published a short story on Alaska "Miss Cal," in order to pay for a trip to a German spa. She also enlists Barker, director of her 1907 suffrage play, to place her Alaskan children's play, "Bowarra." Interestingly, at the same time she is reading the anti-suffrage literature for this article, she is reading far back diaries in a scheme to novelize her early days on the American stage, writing to Florence Bell on 28 July, 1910: "I mean to begin my Magnum Opus. This one you will care about." This project will turn into her multi-part bildungsroman, never published, "Theodora: A Pilgrimage."

238.

Unkindest cut of all. The allusion is to Antony's funeral oration for Caesar in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. He tells the citizens that Brutus delivered the "most unkindest cut of all."  

243.

Women Writers at the Criterion. The correct date of this essay is May 23, 1911, misprinted as 1910 in this copy text, but verified in ER's diary and the Hodder and Stoughton Company's publication of the text. Moreover, it is not cross referenced to its collected form here in Way Stations, where, in Sue Thomas' bibliography, she lists this earlier printing in Miscellaneous Essays: 183. 'The Real Woman.' Votes for Women 30 June 1911: 639. Boldly subtitled, "A Speech Delivered by Miss Elizabeth Robins at The Women Writers' Suffrage League Meeting," that earlier printing is, in fact, this essay. Perhaps Thomas overlooked identifying it because Robins states in the Author's Note that a separate Women Writers' Suffrage League speech, Chapter VIII, had not previously been published. The version of the essay as it appeared in Votes for Women can be read online from the Archive at LSE, https://lse-atom.arkivum.net/uklse-dl1wr030150050026-uklse-dl1-wr03-015-005-0026-0001-pdf. Click on the image for full access to the issue. Page 639 is the right side of the second screen shot. Google has also digitized this issue of Votes for Women. Search for Votes for Women alphabetically at https://news.google.com/newspapers.  

276.

In the original, the close-quotation mark at end of paragraph has no corresponding open quotation mark. For this edition, the phrase "Votes for Women" is set off by the pair of quotation marks.

277.

In the printed text, this lead-in sentence is inset and run in with the block quotation following. It has been adjusted to conform with block quotation style.

285.

The three inset paragraphs on this page are not inset in the printed text, but are formatted in a manner to conform to block quotations elsewhere.

288.

Footnote: The Dodd Mead copytext has "March 7, 1911" as the date, a misprint for 1912 that is corrected in this on-line edition.

295.

As noted in Sue Thomas' Bibliography, Miscellaneous Articles, Number 186, The original printing of "The Perfidy of Sympathizers" is in the March 22, 1912 issue of Votes for Women, page 393. To access the image of this article, go to the issue folder at London School of Economics archive, https://lse-atom.arkivum.net/uklse-dl1wr030150060012.

Click on the image of the issue. The page image will be the right side of the fifth image in, or https://lse-atom.arkivum.net/uploads/r/the-womens-library/f/b/e/fbedd1739d0ae42a563b935db4f867359030af2d983126c4e8ec4c252bde6d2c/7d117c0c-9b5b-41fa-a463-c912c3382d58-UKLSE_DL1_WR03_015_006_0012_0001.0fbcb13a-2c1a-4e37-9e9c-1bd0489e25dd.pdf 

Also note well that in the same issue, two pages earlier (p. 391), there is a full-page announcement for the Albert Hall Speech, the text of which is the next chapter of Way Stations. Portraits of the chair Annie Kenney and speakers Robins, Annie Besant, Israel Zangwell, and Evelyn Sharp are displayed. It is interesting that late in her life, Robins would pen a tribute to Besant and remember her powerful voice in the large Hall. The essay remains unpublished but Carol Hanbery MacKay discusses it in her book Creative Negativity (2002).

301

and 302. Inset paragraphs of direct quotation at bottom of this page and on page 302 are not inset in the original. The change is made to conform to style established elsewhere, on pages 77-78.

317.

The original text for "Sermons in Stones" is the April 1912 Issue of the London-based Contemporary Review. It can be found in image form at HathiTrust, Volume 101 Jan-Jun 1912. A duplicate of the imaged text can be found in this file. Note that ER's diary provides evidence that Contemporary Review solicited this article..

321.

It appears that a typographical misprint has left off the close-quotation mark after ship.

326.

Robins has quoted Gladstone's reference to violence in a previous chapter, "The Prisoner's Banquet." To page 31.

349.

It is informative to visit McClure's printing of the essay, subtitled "A Defense of Militant Suffrage." It can be found in the HathiTrust archive as Volume 40, with full text images of the volume, linked at this first page, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435027077197&seq=639,  of the twelve-page article. In addition to photographic reproductions of some named and unnamed suffragists, the magazine reproduces images of hammers, concealed in "Dorothy bags," pictures of bobbies using force to arrest protesters, a pillar box being inspected for acid damage to the contents. Named suffragists who are portrayed are as follows: Christabel Pankhurst, Edith Craig, Mrs. Despard, Miss [Jessie] Kenney (disguised as delivery boy), Emmeline and Cristabel Pankhurst in prison uniforms, and Alice Paul. The caption on page 48 verifies that American audiences recognized the importance of Alice Paul (see below):

MISS ALICE PAUL, A DAUGHTER OF THE OLD PAUL FAMILY OF PHILADELPHIA, WHO WAS

ARRESTED AND IMPRISONED IN ENGLAND BECAUSE OF HER MILITANT

DEMONSTRATIONS

 

As a head note to Robins' text, the editors provide this introduction:

For seven years the world has watched with curious interest the strange and sensational duel which has been in progress in that eminently man-ruled and conservative country, Great Britain-the duel between the militant advocates of votes for women and the unrelenting ministers of government.

From heckling political speakers, these "crusaders" have passed to breaking windows; from breaking windows to imprisonment; from imprisonment to hunger strikes; and with each fresh outburst the American public has wondered why such methods were employed: whether violence really was effective; if such acts as the destruction of public mail-boxes did not do the Suffrage cause more harm than good. The entire campaign has been an enigma to the United States.

In the following article one of the leading advocates of Woman Suffrage in England answers these questions for American readers. (p. 41)

Angela John in her biography documents that Robins had shared a draft of the essay with Chritabel Pankhurst in December 1912, thus after ER's October resignation from the board of the WSPU (p. 171). My biography details more exactly the circumstances under which ER resigned from the board (pp. 208-212). Thus, by the time the article appeared in the US, Robins was undergoing grave misgivings on the efficacy of militancy and the growing autocracy of the WSPU leadership, though she remained in correspondence with Cristabel and would publish a portrait of her in Harper's Weekly, December 1913.

Consequently, at the time of first publication, as America had some interest in how Alice Paul was making headlines, with her organization and publicity strategies for the Suffrage Parade in Washington DC, adjacent to Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Robins herself was personally conflicted with the direction taken by the WSPU leadership yet publicly supportive of the cause. She would articulate a more critical perspective of the leadership of the Pankhursts when she wrote Ancilla's Share, published in 1924.

The contents of the entire volume 40 of McClure's are worth examining, for in the December and January issues appear a condensed version of Robins' novel of a youngster tricked and abducted into prostitution, My Little Sister. ER got special dispensation from her English publisher, Heinemann, to serialize a condensed version prior to his publication. Once released in book form, My Little Sister sold widely and prompted Robins to secure a stage adaptation. Also in this volume 40, McClure's designates Inez Milholland for its writer of record for a "New Department for Women," with an overtly pro-suffrage slant. More routinely, the magazine published the mysteries of G. K. Chesterson, including his Father Brown series.

363.

"Prim little scholars . . . if they please," from lines 97-98 of George Meredith's "Love in the Valley," originally 1851.

Table of Contents for Way Stations


Available on the web since July 1999