Elizabeth Robins Pennell

Philadelphia, 1855 - 1936, New York

BiographyLC name authority rec. no.n50049376
Biography:
Was born in Philadelphia, Pa., to Edward and Margaret (Holmes) Robins. Her grandfather Thomas Robins, a Virginian of English stock, was the first member of the family to settle in Philadelphia, where for many years he was president of the Philadelphia National Bank. Edward Robins, her father, was a broker. Though he came of an Episcopalian family, he became a convert to Catholicism when Elizabeth was eight, and the children were brought up in that faith. Elizabeth was educated at Sacred Heart convents, first at Conflans, near Paris, where she spent a year when she was six, and, from 1863 to 1872, at Eden Hall in Torresdale, Pa., where she was a classmate of the author AGNES REPPLIER, later a close friend. Since her mother died when Elizabeth was very young, she and her sister spent many of their holidays and summer vacations at the Torresdale convent, with occasional visits to their paternal grandparents' home in Philadelphia. Elizabeth was an able student, though by her own admission not always well behaved; her long years at the convent, however, did little to prepare her for Philadelphia society, and her debut after graduation was the beginning of a rather dull and aimless period in her life. Her father had remarried, and Elizabeth now made her home with him and her stepmother. It was, however, her uncle Charles Godfrey Leland, a well-known humorist and essayist, who became her mentor, after his return to Philadelphia from abroad in 1880, and who was most responsible for Elizabeth's finding her métier as a writer and critic.

Currently interested in introducing the minor arts (handicrafts, drawing, and design) into the curriculum of the public schools. Leland enlisted his niece as his assistant. He tried as well to have her take up the decorative arts, and when she showed little talent, prodded her into beginning to write. In July 1881 her first article, “Mischief in the Middle Ages,” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. The magazine published other of her articles, chiefly on history and mythology, and Elizabeth Robins began also, through Leland's good offices, to write for Philadelphia newspapers and a weekly Philadelphia magazine, the American. In 1881 Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of Scribner's Magazine (soon to become the Century), asked Leland to write the text to accompany eight etchings of Philadelphia by Joseph Pennell, a young Philadelphia artist. Leland, too busy himself, suggested his niece instead, and “A Ramble in Old Philadelphia,” published in March 1882, was the first of many collaborations. With Pennell's assistance, Elizabeth soon became art critic for the American and the Philadelphia Press. They were married early in June 1884, the same year that Elizabeth Pennell's first book, the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in the Roberts Brothers' Famous Women Series.

The Century had commissioned Pennell to do further illustrations for William Dean Howells' Tuscan Cities, and within a few weeks of their marriage the Pennells sailed for England. After a summer cycling trip to Canterbury, which resulted in their first joint book, A Canterbury Pilgrimage (1885), they went to Italy before settling in London. Commissions from the Century, Harper's Magazine, and other periodicals continued, making it feasible for the Pennells to remain abroad. Their life took on a pattern of work in London during the winters and travel throughout Europe during the summers, at first on a tandem tricycle, later on bicycles, and sometimes on foot. In addition to the many articles which appeared in British and American periodicals between 1884 and 1898, their adventures were published in nine books for which Mrs. Pennell wrote the text and Pennell did the illustrations, among them Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1888), Our Journey to the Hebrides (1889), The Stream of Pleasure (1891), To Gipsyland (1893), and Over the Alps on a Bicycle (1898).

In 1888 Pennell succeeded George Bernard Shaw as art critic of the London Star. Elizabeth Pennell wrote the column when her husband could not do the work, or when his Century commitments kept him away from London for long periods, and eventually took it over altogether when he tired of it. Although she did not consider herself an expert, she gained a firm reputation as an art critic, and she contributed articles on art to the London Chronicle, the New York Nation, and many other journals. For twenty-five years she visited Paris every spring, after the openings of the annual National Academy and New Gallery exhibitions in London, to review the salons. A lesser interest was the field of cookery, begun when she was invited to do a weekly column on the subject for the Pall Mall Gazette, a column she continued for five years. Her culinary essays were collected in 1896 under the title Feasts of Autolycus, the Diary of a Greedy Woman, with later editions in 1900 (Delights of Delicate Eating) and 1923 (A Guide for the Greedy).

The Pennells' marriage, which was childless, was a happy one, her serene nature complementing his tempestuous one. “When work was in question,” she wrote, “he could ill adapt himself to the habits and movements of others. With me it was different.... Early or late as he might be, however he might alter his day's programme, I was prepared to fit in my engagements and movements to suit his convenience, knowing that artists are not like other men, he least of all.” In the early days in London, Pennell's method of writing was to dictate to his wife, who took the text down in longhand, trying to round it out as she wrote. Besides running the household, she kept the accounts and attended to much of the business with publishers and others. Yet their “working partnership” always respected the resolution they had formed before their marriage: “not to allow anything to interfere with his drawing and my writing.”

At their London flat “Mrs. Pennell's tact, charm and genius for sympathetic listening, and Mr. Pennell's picturesque frankness made them both popular,” wrote Edward Laroque Tinker. Their circle of friends was wide, embracing artists, writers, journalists, and publishers. Aubrey Beardsley, George Bernard Shaw, Phil May, Henry Harland, and William Ernest Henley were among those who frequented the Pennells' Thursday evening “at homes”; their most famous friendship, however, which began in 1892, was with the artist James McNeill Whistler With Whistler's consent, in 1900 the publisher William Heinemann asked Pennell to write the artist's biography; Pennell agreed on condition that his wife collaborate. The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1908) was an immediate success and went through three printings; a fifth and sixth edition (1911 and 1919) were completely revised with the addition of new material. After Whistler's death in 1903 the Pennells gave much of their time to the perpetuation of his fame, helping prepare the memorial exhibition held by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London in 1905, and developing their collection of Whistleriana, which they gave to the Library of Congress in 1921.

Mrs. Pennell traveled less frequently with her husband as she devoted more and more of her time to her writing. After the publication in 1906 of her biography of Charles Godfrey Leland, however, they visited the cathedrals in northern France in preparation for their French Cathedrals, Monasteries and Abbeys, and Sacred Sites of France (1909) and made a trip to the United States in 1908-her first in twenty-four years. Our Philadelphia (1914), a descriptive recollection of that city during the Victorian era, was followed by Nights: Rome, Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris in the Fighting Nineties (1916) and a novel, The Lovers (1917).

In 1917, because of the war, the Pennells decided to return to the United States. They went first to Philadelphia, but the city they had known and loved had changed, and in June 1921 they settled in New York, at the Hotel Margaret in Brooklyn. After Joseph Pennell's death in 1926, Mrs. Pennell assembled and published his pictures of New York and Philadelphia, supervised the preparation of catalogues raisonées of his watercolors, drawings, etchings, and lithographs, and wrote a two-volume Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell (1929), one of her most distinguished works. Elizabeth Robins Pennell died of chronic myocarditis in New York City two weeks before her eighty-first birthday. She was buried beside her husband in the Friends Burial Ground in Germantown, Pa. “She with her books and he with his drawings,” wrote their friend Edward Tinker, “have done more than any other two people I know to spread in America a popular knowledge of the art of the old world, of the everyday life of its people, of the beauty of its countryside and of the architectural loveliness of its cities: and all the while they were just as industrious in making known in Europe the work of American artists.”

[Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Our Philadelphia (1914), The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell (1929), and Nights (1916); Edward Laroque Tinker, The Pennells (pamphlet, privately printed, 1951); Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X, 377; Gertrude B. Biddle and Sarah D. Lowrie, eds., Notable Women of Pa. (1942); Who Was Who in America, vol. I (1942); N.Y. Times, Feb. 8, 9, 1936, July 17, 1936, Feb. 2, 1937. See also the article on Joseph Pennell in Dict. Am. Biog. Death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health (which gives her mother's maiden name as Harriet Holmes). There are 572 letters of Elizabeth Pennell at the Univ. of Pa.; other papers are at the Hist. Soc. of Pa. and the Print Collection of the Library of Congress.]

ALICE LEE PARKER
(Parker, Alice LEE. 1971. "Pennell, Elizabeth Robins (Feb. 21, 1855-feb. 7, 1936)". In Notable American Women: 1607-1950, edited by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, accessed September 2015. www.credoreference.com).

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Last Updated8/7/24

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