Suffrage writers and directors Brief Biographies

 

Elizabeth Robins  (1862-1952) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, educated in Ohio and became an actress with the Boston Museum Company, before Robins moving to London in 1889 where she established herself as a major actress and became active in the movement to bring Ibsen's plays to Britain, working with the critic William Archer. with fellow American actress, Marion Lea, She produced Hedda Gabler and performed leading roles in many other Ibsen and wrote the book Ibsen and the Actress (1928). With her friend Florence Bell she wrote the controversial play Alan's Wife (1893). Robins also produced Bell’s translation of Alfhild Agrell's Karin, (1892) translated. Fifteen novels, several with theatrical themes, others set in Alaska, followed including George Mandeville's Husband (1894), and The Convert adapted from her play Votes For Women, (1907) the first major play about the suffrage campaign in Britain Robins was a prominent member of the WSPU and first President of the WWSL. In 1913 many of her speeches, lectures and articles on the Suffrage Movement were published in volume form as Way Stations.

See

Votes for Women and Other Plays ed. Susan Croft (Aurora Metro, 2009) for a lengthier biography

and

Both Sides of the Curtain: an Autobiography by Elizabeth Robins London & Toronto: William Heinemann

Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life 1862-1952 by Angela V. John. London: Routledge, 1995

Elizabeth Robins 1862-1952; Actress, Novelist and Feminist by Joanne E. Gates,Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994

 

 

Cicely Hamilton(1872-1952) was the daughter of an army officer, Denzill Hamill Cicely Hamilton was born in London. After a stint as a pupil-teacher, she became an actress, touring throughout the provinces, and also began writing short popular fiction. Her first play The Sixth Commandment was produced in 1906 at Wyndham's in London and was followed by The Sergeant of Hussars in aid of the Actors’ Association (1907) and in 1908 by the successful Diana of Dobson's, an important feminist analysis of the marriage market, produced by Lena Ashwell at the Kingsway Theatre. She later later developed these themes in the book, Marriage as Trade (1909), Hamilton put her public recognition to the service of the suffrage campaign, joining the WSPU and becoming a speaker at rallies and co-founding WWSL with Bessie Hatton and writing three classics of the suffrage campaign: the play How The Vote Was Won, with Chris St John, the words to her friend, Ethel Smyth's anthem, "March of the Women" and A Pageant of Women (AFL, Scala, Nov 1909. Other plays included the suffrage piece The Pot and the Kettle (with St John, AFL, 1909), Just To Get Married (1910), and Lady Noggs (1913). At the start of the War, Hamilton joined the Scottish Women's Hospitals Organisation as a hospital administrator and went on to establish concert parties and organise theatre performances for the troops. She continued writing after the War as a successful journalist, helping found the feminist magazine Time and Tide, and wrote novels including William: an Englishman (1919) and a history of the Old Vic.

 

See Votes for Women and Other Plays ed. Susan Croft (Aurora Metro, 2009) for a lengthier biography

and

Life Errant by Cicely Hamilton. London: Dent, 1935

The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton by Lis Whitelaw. London: the Women's Press, 1990

 

 

Edith Craig (1869-1947) was the daughter of Ellen Terry and architect William Godwin and sister of theatre designer and theorist Edward Gordon Craig. She began her career as a stage manager to her mother and a costume designer. In 1899 she met Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall) and they set up house together in Smith Square, becoming active members of the suffrage movement, artistic collaborators and lovers. Edith Craig began increasingly establishing a career as a director, buying the rights to suffrage plays, directing numerous AFL productions including How the Vote Was Won and numerous versions of Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women around the country. With Chris she went on to set up the innovative theatre company The Pioneer Players, producing numerous plays by women and introducing new European theatre work. George Bernard Shaw observed that Edward Gordon Craig had become world famous by virtue of producing very few plays while his sister was virtually unknown but had produced everything.In the 1920s, she went on to work at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, and as Art Director of the Leeds Art Theatre. With Chris she set up home at Smallhythe in Kent, in a house next to her mother’s, later in a ménage-a-trois with the artist Claire Atwood. In 1928 she converted the adjoining barn into a theatre where annual Shakespeare productions have since been staged in memory of Ellen Terry as well as other performances. Craig is said to have inspired the character  Miss LaTrobe in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) who directs a village play about the history of England.

See

Edith Craig (1869-1947) Dramatic Lives by Katharine Cockin. London: Cassell, 1998

 

La Prima Regista: Edith Craig, fra rivoluzione della scena e cultura delle donne by Roberta Gandolfi. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003

 

http://www.ellenterryarchive.hull.ac.uk/

http://www.ellenterrybarntheatre.co.uk/index.htm

 

 

Christopher St John (1871-1960) assumed the name when she converted to Catholicism. She was born Christabel Marshall, daughter of a banker and the novelist, Emma  Marshall. Chris went to Oxford University and then worked as Secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill. In 1899 she fulfilled a long-standing desire to meet Ellen Terry and met and fell in love with Terry's daughter, Edith (Edy) Craig. They  set up house together in Smith Square, becoming active members of the suffrage movement, and in 1909 St John was arrested for setting light to a pillar-box .and at the Priest’s House at Smallhythe, Kent where they were later joined by visual artist Claire “Tony” Atwood. Chris remained devoted to Edy throughout her life, supporting her in her directing career: St John's 1915 novel, Hungerheart: the Story of a Soul (1915) is a fictionalised version of their relationship. With Edy she established the innovative Pioneer Players, which produced many of Chris’s plays numerous plays and translations, along with many other feminist writers and experimental works from the European repertoire. Chris St  John also edited Ellen Terry's Memoirs, wrote music and dramatic criticism, in particular for Time and Tide and The Lady, a biography of composer and feminist, Ethel Smyth. 

See

Votes for Women and Other Plays ed. Susan Croft (Aurora Metro, 2009) for a lengthier biography

and

Edy: Recollections of Edith Craig London: Frederick Muller, 1949

 

 

Marion Holmes (née Milner, 1867-1943) was born in New Wortley, Leeds and grew up near Barnsley, where her earliest memories were of miners begging for food. The family moved to Retford, Notts when she was ten. She married at 21 and moved to Ringwood, Notts.,  where she had two daughters, and thence to Margate where she set up the Margate Pioneer Society. They then moved to Croydon where she first became involved in suffrage activism, serving as first as President of her local WSPU and doing time in Holloway. She later became a member of the National Executive of the WFL and co-editor of  The Vote, first with Cicely Hamilton, then with Mrs T.P.O’Connor. Her two plays A Child of the Mutiny ‘a powerful dramatic sketch’, were performed at suffrage events. Brass and Clay was performed at the Woman’s Kingdom Exhibition, 22 Apr 1914 in a programme that also included Evelyn Glover’s Which? and performances by children of the Italia Conti school. She was a freelance journalist for 25 years, serving on the committee of the Society for Women Journalists. She also published ‘cameo life sketches’ on Lydia Becker, Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and other earlier feminists and an ABC of Votes for Women (1913).  

See scrapbook in Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London and profile, The Vote 16 April 1910.

 

Madeleine Lucette Ryley (1858 -1934) was born in London, where she began her stage career in Britain as "Madeline Lucette" in 1879 and by 1881 had emigrated with her family to the USA was working on the New York stage, where she became known as an actress and singer in comic opera, creating the title-role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience in the US. She he married the comedian J.H. Ryley. She worked as an actress on both sides of the Atlantic till around 1891, before focusing primarily on playwriting, writing seventeen plays scoring major successes with Christopher Junior (New York, 1895, as Jedbury Junior, London, 1896), Mice and Men and An American Citizen (1899), In London she and her husband became established members of London theatrical society living in Maida Vale where friend included fellow suffragist Gertrude Elliot and Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who produced (with Elliott as Peggy, one of her favourite roles according to her interview in The Vote, 9 July 1910, p124).  Ryley became a Vice-President of the Actresses Franchise League in Britain and a member of its Executive Committee, as well as a founder member of the Women Writers Suffrage League, who published Ryley’s The Suffrage Question in 1909. She played Catherine of Siena in Cicely Hamilton's Pageant of Great Women, produced by the AFL (Scala, 1909) and was profiled in The Vote, 26 Mar 1910 (See Engle for interview). Her niece Jane Comfort was also an actress and AFL member (interview in Women’s Library)

See

New Women Dramatists in America, 1890-1920 by Sherry Engle. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

 

Vera Wentworth (1890-1957) was born Jessie Spink, and was, as Sylvia Pankhurst described her, "a shop assistant, who wore Christabel's portrait on her chest … with ambitions towards novel-writing and the university" Her brother Wilfred Spinks led a strike of women workers in the East End and introduced her to radical left-wing thinker, Fenner Brockway. A prominent and militant member of the WSPU she was sent to prison seven times for political activities including breaking windows and harassing the Prime Minister, went on hunger-strike four times and was force fed. From 1912-1914 she studied at St Andrew's University. She later became an adherent of non-violence. Her play An Allegory features Woman as a traveller towards the City of Progress, impeded by Prejudice and Fear. It was staged by the AFL in 1911and in Holloway by women prisoners in March 1912.

 

Margaret Wynne Nevinson, (1858-1932), was born Margaret Jones in a Welsh-speaking vicarage, the only daughter (among 5 sons) of a Classics scholar who gave her a good education. She taught at South Hampstead High School for Girls, studied at St Andrew’s University, campaigned for the Married Woman’s Property Act and met and married the journalist and Manchester Guardian war correspondent Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856-1941) in 1884. They worked together at Toynbee Hall in the East End before moving to Hampstead where she wrote journalism. She served for 25 years as a school manager and later Poor Law Guardian and Justice of the Peace. She was active in the WSPU, the Tax Resistance League and especially the Women's Freedom League who published her pamphlets Ancient Suffragettes (1911) and Five Year’s Struggle for Freedom: a history of the suffrage movement 1908-1912. her husband became a founder of the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement. Her play In the Workhouse caused controversy when produced by the Pioneer Players in 1911. She published a series of short pieces in newspapers and journals, later collected as Workhouse Characters, Fragments of Life, 1922, and her memoirs, Life’s Fitful Fever (1926).

See Votes for Women and Other Plays ed. Susan Croft (Aurora Metro, 2009) for a lengthier biography.

and

Life's Fitful Fever: a Volume of Memoirs by Margaret Wynne Nevinson. London: A.E. Black, 1926

 

Evelyn Sharp (1869-1955) was born in London, daughter of a slate merchant Evelyn Sharp was the ninth of eleven children, one of them Cecil Sharp, founder of the English Dance and Folksong Society. Her education was patchy though she passed several university local examinations and lead what she called a "purposeless existence" until she began writing and, to her family’s disapproval, left home in 1894. She became a tutor, wrote for The Yellow Book and became part of its circle before beginning writing for the Manchester Guardian and later the Daily Herald. Her novels included At the Relton Arms (1895) and The Making of a Prig (1897). An ardent feminist, she joined the WSPU in 1906, publishing an account of suffrage activities in Rebel Women (1910) and was twice imprisoned in Holloway for her part in suffrage protests. Later she was a tax resister, a socialist, Quaker and pacifist and did relief work in Germany. She became the second wife of war correspondent, Henry Woodd Nevinson, after the death of her friend Margaret Wynne Nevinson. She was a Vice President of the WWSL, inspired to support the cause after she heard Elizabeth Robins speak in 1906, and a supporter of Inez Bensusan's Women's Theatre. She wrote the libretto for Ralph Vaughan Williams' 1926 opera The Poisoned Kiss and a play The Loafer and the Loaf a political fable published in the series ‘Plays for the People’.

See:

Unfinished Adventure by Evelyn Sharp London: S.I Lane, 1933.

 

Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955
by Angela V John. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009

 

Bessie Hatton (dates not known) was the youngest daughter of Joseph Hatton, playwright and novelist and was educated at a convent school in the Ardennes and at Bedford College, London. She made her first appearance as an actress in 1887 in a provincial company and appeared in New York. She was also author of a number of fairy stories, a novel, Enid Lyle (1894), Village of Youth (1895), His Master Passion (1901) and the stories, Pilgrims of Love (1902). In 1908 she became Secretary to the Women Writers Suffrage League and collaborated with Inez Bensusan in encouraging women to write campaigning plays. She wrote plays for the Cause herself, The Outcast with Beatrice Harraden (1909) and Before Sunrise, performed at the Albert Hall, 1909 for the Women's Freedom League.

 

Kate Harvey (?-1946) lived in Bromley but was active in Croydon for the Women’s Freedom League. A remarkable woman, she was the mother of three daughters, widowed and and set up a home for sick and handicapped children at her house Brackenhill in Bromley.  She was also deaf, a theosophist and worked as a physiotherapist. She met Charlotte Despard, the founder of the WFL, through Despard’s charitable work in Nine Elms, Battersea and they became devoted friends. Despard later referred to 12 January 1912 as " the anniversary of our love". When the government levied a new National Insurance tax, Kate Harvey refused to pay it for her gardener and barricaded her home in a lengthy tax resistance strike, eventually going to prison for her actions. She became a heroine of the WFL who struck a medal to celebrate her actions. She travelled to Hungary with Despard and became the WFL’s international representative and Honorary Secretary, organising the International Suffrage Fair, Nov 1912. She also hosted garden parties and other events for the Cause at her home. She wrote several plays including Baby performed by Pioneer Players (1911), dramatic version of Longfellow's Hiawatha and Courage (1914).

See

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/womens-suffrage-movement-the-story-of-kate-harvey-516710.html

 

Alice Chapin (1858-1924) was born at Keene, New Hampshire. She became an actress and spent her career partly in the USA, partly in Britain, marrying Harry Clarke in 1881 and divorcing him and moving to London in 1888 with her son, Harold Chapin who became and actor and playwright (1886-1915) and was killed in the First World War. She also had a daughter, Elsie who appeared in several of her mother’s plays. Her many plays included Shame (with E.H.C. Oliphant 1892), The Wrong Legs (1896), A Knight Errant (1906), The Happy Medium (with P. Gaye, 1909) and Outlawed (Court, 1911) a dramatisation, with Mabel Collins, of the novel by Collins and Women’s Freedom League leader Charlotte Despard’s of the same name. She was an early and committed member of the AFL, appearing in many suffrage plays and a dedicated member of the WFL. In 1909, at the age of 51, she was arrested for pouring acid into ballot boxes, together with her fellow-protester, Alison Neilans. Only Chapin was found guilty, as the acid slightly splashed and "injured" one of the tellers. Chapin was sentenced to imprisonment for four months. She later returned to the USA where she appeared in eleven films between 1917 and 1925 and died in Keene. Her brother Alfred Chapin (1848-1936) became mayor of Brooklyn, NY and a United States Congressman.

See Votes for Women and Other Plays ed. Susan Croft (Aurora Metro, 2009) for additional information.

 

 

Jennie Cohen (dates not known) was daughter of Myer Salaman and married Herbert D. Cohen in 1884 and had one son and a daughter. They were members of the wealthy Anglo-Jewish society and lived at 2 Orme Court, Holland Park. Relatives included the artistic Lowy family, also active in the suffrage movement, – Mrs Lowy was a sister of the Royal Academy painter Solomon J Solomon as was painter Lily Delissa Joseph. Both she and Cohen became patrons of the young poet and painter, Isaac Rosenberg in his studies at the Slade School. He died in the First World War. Cohen had several plays produced in London including The Chain (1910, also in Cardiff) and The Level Crossing (Pioneer Players, 1914) and The Lonely Festival (1916). She was an active worker for women's suffrage with the WWSL and the Jewish League for Women's Suffrage and a supporter of Inez Bensusan's Women's Theatre and a member of the Advisory Committee of Edy Craig’s Pioneer Players.

 

Lena Ashwell (1872-1957) was born Lena Margaret Pocock on board ship en route to Canada where she grew up then travelling first to Lausanne, Switzerland and then the Royal Academy of Music in London to study music., proved to be inadequate and, apparently She became an actress on the advice of Ellen Terry when her voice proved not up to a musical career and first appeared on stage in 1891 in The Pharisee. She appeared, with Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving in Joseph Comyns Carr’s King Arthur and made her name in Henry Arthur Jones’ Mrs Dane’s Defence. She went into theatre management. In 1906 she went into theatre management, first briefly at the Savoy and then, from 1907 to 1915, running her own theatre, the Kingsway where she produced Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s. She was active in the AFL and also founded the Three Arts Club to provide good quality accommodation for women in the arts. Later, with AFL colleagues Eva and Decima Moore, she organized large-scale entertainment for troops at the front during the First World War.

See

Myself a Player by Lena Ashwell. London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1936