Arranged in three subseries; oversize materials (one box):
Subseries A: General Correspondence, 1873 - 1887
Subseries B: General Correspondence, 1888 - 1952
Subseries C: General Correspondence, Subject Files

Subseries A and B are arranged alphabetically by correspondent; Subseries C is alphabetical by subject. All are arranged chronologically within each folder; undated materials are filed at the end of folders. The General Correspondence series is composed primarily of letters written to Elizabeth Robins. Copies of, or notes on, her outgoing correspondence are filed chronologically under the name of the person addressed.

Subseries A. General Correspondence, 1873 1887
The letters in Subseries A cover the period Elizabeth Robins lived in the United States, before England became her permanent home. She spent her early years in Staten Island, New York and Zanesville, Ohio. She attended the Putnam Female Seminary in Ohio, and then spent a summer with her father at Summit, Rio Grande County, Colorado. After deciding to become an actress, Robins worked at the Boston Museum Company and toured with James O'Neill's Monte Cristo Traveling Company and the Booth and Barrett Dramatic Company. She also met and married George Richmond Parks, an actor with the Boston Museum Company, in 1885. Correspondence from all these periods in her life are represented in Subseries A.

Subseries A contains letters from childhood friends, relatives, family friends, actors, actresses and admirers. There are also letters from Dr. Andrew McLaughlin of the Oak Lawn Retreat for the Insane in Jacksonville, Illinois where Robins's mother, Hannah Crow Robins, was committed for several years.

Robins and her husband, George Richmond Parks, traveled separately in their work, and many letters from Parks to Robins survive. The letters begin during their courtship in 1884 and end with Parks's suicide note in 1887. Folder 47 contains Parks's record book in which he recorded his theatrical engagements (date, place, play, part) for the years 1877-1886. Folder 44 includes newspaper clippings about his suicide.

Elizabeth Robins moved to England in May of 1888 and created an entirely new life for herself. She continued to correspond with her family but lost contact with most of her friends and acquaintances from her early years. The letters of the few American friends and relatives who continued to write after 1887, including Lloyd Tevis, president of Wells Fargo and a maternal cousin of Robins's, who sponsored her early acting career, can be found in Subseries B. Also in Subseries B are occasional letters to Robins during the five months preceding her departure for Europe.

Some letters to and from childhood friends can be found in two letterbooks which date from 1878-1881. The majority of these refer to Robins's four month stay in the Rocky Mountains during her eighteenth summer. [See also Series Three: Robins Family Papers.]

Subseries B. General Correspondence, 1888-1952
Subseries B includes the bulk of Elizabeth Robins's correspondence and reflects her activities -- acting, managing, writing, women's suffrage, and personal relationships -- for the remainder of her life. During the period covered by Subseries B., Robins made her home in a series of London flats and in the homes of her many friends. She had two "permanent" residences: 24 Montpelier Crescent, Brighton and Backsettown House, Henfield, Sussex. She also made several trips to the United States, to property she owned at Chinsegut in Hernando County, Florida, and to visit her brothers on Alaska's Klondyke gold fields in 1900.

Elizabeth Robins began acting shortly after her arrival in England, appearing in matinees and evening performances in London. Her early correspondents from this period include actor-managers such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree (Haymarket), John Hare (Garrick), Charles Wyndam (Criterion), Edward Compton (Opera Comique), and Genevieve Ward; actresses Ellen Terry, Marion Lea, Janet Achurch and Mrs. Patrick Campbell; actors Forbes-Robertson, Charles Charrington, and J.G.Graham; playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Wing Pinero, Dr. George Dabbs, and Justin McCarthy; and critics, including William Archer, Clement Scott, Oswald Crawfurd, and Edmund Gosse.

William Archer and Marion Lea were instrumental in Robins's work with the plays of Henrik Ibsen. With Marion Lea, Robins stage managed Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder; with Archer, she discussed Ibsen in depth. Robins and Archer formed a very close friendship; Subseries B contains Archer's criticisms, newspaper contributions, verses, plot abstracts, and writings, in addition to his correspondence with Robins and others.

Very early in her London career, Robins sought to supplement her income by writing. Many of her friends read and discussed her works in their letters. William Heinemann and William T. Stead (of the Review of Reviews) became her publishers and confidantes. Heinemann owned the English rights to Hedda Gabler and became actively involved in its London production. Stead provided Robins with a letter of introduction to the "behind the scenes" activities at the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1890, and financed her trip to Alaska in 1900 in exchange for her promise to write articles on her experiences. [See also Subseries C, Box 29, Folder 2: "Alaska".]

Before the turn of the century, Robins formed a deep and abiding friendship with Florence Bell. [See Series Five: Florence Bell.] Subseries B includes correspondence with Bell's husband, Sir Hugh, and their children Molly (Lady Trevelyan), Elsa (Lady Richmond), and Hugo. In addition, Robins exchanged letters with Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), Bell's stepdaughter and a renowned adventurer; this correspondence provides interesting information on such places as Calcutta, Acapulco, and Turkey around the turn of the century. [See also correspondence to Sir Hugh Bell in Box 9 of this subseries.]

Subseries B contains other correspondence which reflects the personal relationships in Robins's life. Rachel Sharp was a neighbor at Henfield in Sussex; Marie Jenny-Streiff, a Swiss friend in Robins's later years; Zoe Hadwen and Florence Simmonds lived at Backsettown off and on from the turn of the century and appear to have raised David Scott there and on the Continent. Scott's voluminous correspondence with Robins covers his work with the Royal Air Force, with Cologne's The Watch on the Rhine and as a Paris-based journalist for The Times. [For Octavia Wilberforce correspondence see Subseries C, Box 29, Folders 4 and 5: "Backsettown" and Series Six: Octavia Wilberforce.]

Robins's involvement with the women's suffrage movement is reflected in letters from members of the Women's Social and Political Union such as the Pankhursts, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Annie Kenney and Evelyn Sharp. She was also on the board of the women's magazine Time and Tide with Viscountess Rhondda, Vera S. Laughton and Helen A. Archdale. Robins was a founding member and later honorary president of the Henfield Women's Institute. [See the letters of Margaret Macnamara in Subseries B, Box 19, Folder 124.]

In 1927 Robins opened Backsettown House as a rest home for women. Several people aided her in the daily operation of this venture, including Mary Campion, B.H. Davy, and Evelyn Fellows. The letters of M. Hehir provide many domestic details about Backsettown during the period (1917-1918) in which she was caretaker, including an especially good description of the house and its environs written at Robins' request. Subseries C, "Backsettown" contains many letters from pleased convalescents as well as letters concerning domestic issues.

Subseries B also contains letters from Robins's servants. The letters of the Gardners, a German family who worked for a time at Backsettown, tell of the plight of foreign nationals in England during World War I. The letters of Geraldine Lawler, Robins's caretaker at 6 Palace Gate, London, contain many interesting comments on current events from the point of view of one of the "silent masses." The letters of C. Kohler, who worked for Robins at 28 Manchester Square Mansions, were used as the basis of the story "Vroni" in her anthology Below the Salt. The dictated letters of Fielder Harris, an employee of Chinsegut (the Florida farm), tell something about black life in the deep South in the early twentieth century. (See also Series Nine: Photographic Materials, Chinsegut.) The letters of Lisa Von Borowsky document the operation of Chinsegut both in its era of private ownership and its period as a government wildlife preserve. Much of this correspondence is also devoted to descriptions of Robins's brother, Raymond Robins, who made Chinsegut his home. [See also Series Four: Raymond Robins and Margaret Dreier Robins.]

Many well-known personages in the fields of literature, history and politics are represented in this correspondence. George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, John Masefield, and Thomas Hardy are a representative sample of authors who wrote to Robins. W.E.B. du Bois, Alice Stopford Green, Herbert Hoover, Colonel House, Salmon O. Levinson, and Ramsay MacDonald brought Robins into a wider, non-theatrical, non-literary sphere.

The box and folder list for Subseries B serves as a general index to Elizabeth Robins's correspondence, 1888-1952.

Subseries C: General Correspondence, Subject Files
Subseries C contains files arranged alphabetically by subject matter. The material in these files consists mainly of correspondence, enclosures, brochures, notes and drafts of letters which were either arranged as a unit by Elizabeth Robins or are intrinsically connected.

The letters in this subseries concern travel arrangements (to Scotland, Virginia Hot Springs, Alaska, and other parts of the United States), local matters (Backsettown), and social arrangements. There is also material on the magazine Time and Tide.

Photographs of most of the people included in Series Two: General Correspondence can be found in Series Nine: Photographic Materials. Photographs which were enclosed with letters have been transferred to Series Nine.