The materials in Series One cover the years 1873-1952, all but the earliest years of Elizabeth Robins's long life. Through the diaries, engagement books and notebooks in this series, it is possible to trace her movements and thoughts over these years.

Arranged in three subseries; chronological within each subseries:
Subseries A: Diaries, 1876-1952
Subseries B: Engagement Books, 1892
Subseries C: Notebooks, 1873-1940

Subseries A: Diaries, 1876-1952
This subseries consists of Robins's diaries from the time she was fourteen years old (1876) to the last year of her life (1952). This subseries is remarkably complete with the exception of the 1890's.

Robins did not always write lengthy diary entries, but she wrote often, which allows one to piece together many of her activities over the years. Sometimes she would skip days of writing in her diaries, then compensate for those periods by filling in the blank pages from memory.

Subseries B: Engagement Books, 1892
While some of the engagement books in subseries B are nearly blank, others contain pages full of her notes and are helpful to use in conjunction with the diaries.

Most of Robins's diaries record daily life at home, but there are several volumes which she wrote while traveling. Notable among these are her 1880 "Summit, Rocky Mountains" diary, kept during her eighteenth summer while visiting her father at the Little Annie Gold Mining Company, Summit, Colorado; her 1900 diary from her journey to the Klondyke where her brother Raymond Robins had gone in search of gold; and her 1905-1906 Chinsegut diary, written during a visit to Raymond Robins and Margaret Dreier Robins in Florida.

Robins regularly recorded the names of visitors who came to her home and wrote of her outings with friends. Through her diaries one is able to see that she developed a support network of women, some of whom lived part of the time at Backsettown, her Sussex home.

The diaries are also important for tracing Robins's involvement in the women's suffrage movement. Although she was active in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the Actresses' Franchise League, and the Women Writers' Suffrage League, this aspect of her life is not fully represented in the Robins Papers. The diaries, however, do record her involvement with the movement, especially with the Pankhursts and the WSPU. Robins made a note of it when she went to her first WSPU committee meeting (November 12,1907), mentioned visits by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, remarked on Emmeline Pankhurst's reactions to forcible feeding of imprisoned suffragists, and, in a lengthy entry, described the meeting which would cause the Pethick-Lawrences to split away from the Pankhursts (October 10, 1912).

Robins often used her diaries as sources for her literary works, as is evident by some of the annotations in the volumes. She also wrote about the books she was working on, so the diaries show some of the questions she was grappling with concerning the characters and plots of her works.

Subseries C: Notebooks, 1873-1940
Subseries C contains notebooks dating back to 1873, when Robins was eleven years old. There are composition books from her time at the Putnam Female Seminary in Ohio, as well as records of books she read and a drawing book from 1879-1880. Also in this series are thirty-three volumes of small notebooks ranging in date from 1877-1940.