Elizabeth Robins Pennell

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with the writer Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952).

Sketch of Pennell by her husband Joseph

Elizabeth Robins Pennell (February 21, 1855 – February 7, 1936) was an American writer who, for most of her adult life, made her home in London. A researcher summed her up in a work published in 2000 as "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic";

Whistler. In recent years, her art criticism has come under scrutiny, and her food criticism
has been reprinted.

Early life

She grew up in

Atlantic Monthly, and through this work she met a young Quaker artist named Joseph Pennell, who had also had to face down parental disapproval to pursue his creative calling. This began a fruitful collaboration between writer and illustrator.[2]

First book, marriage, move to London

Cover of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennell's first book

Her first book was the first full-length biography of

the Roberts Brothers of Boston, as one of the first in their Famous Women series, and also in London by the Walter Scott Publishing Company
.

In June that year, Elizabeth Robins married

William E. Henley."[5] Pennell wrote of these gatherings in her memoirs, Our House and the People in It (1910), Our House and London Out of Our Windows (1912), and Nights: Rome & Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties
, London & Paris in the Fighting Nineties (1916).

Her works and their appraisal

Art criticism

Pennell's main work was as an art and, later, a food critic, writing for periodicals including the

Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s St Jude's at Whitechapel).[7]

Kimberly Morse Jones writes that "Pennell's criticism constitutes a vital component of a wider movement in Victorian criticism that came to be known as the

D.S. MacColl, George Moore, R.A.M. Stevenson, Charles Whibley and Frederick Wedmore as fellow contributors to this movement. These writers, including Pennell, were instrumental in developing formalist art criticism, an important method adopted by some critics in the twentieth century.[8]

Food criticism

Pennell's place in the literary history of cooking and eating has recently been reappraised, as she "paved the way for food writers such as Elizabeth David, M. F. K. Fisher, and Jane Grigson," according to Jacqueline Block Williams.[9]

Pennell was a regular contributor to a column in the

A Winter's Tale.) She commented that it was "daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever offered to any eager world"; she compiled her culinary essays as The Feasts of Autolycus: the Diary of a Greedy Woman (1896).[10] This compilation was reprinted in 2000 as The Delights of Delicate Eating, and Pennell appears as one of the "forgotten female aesthetes" that Shaeffer evaluates in her book of that title,[11] one who "aimed to reconfigure meals as high art, employing the language of aestheticism to turn eating into an act of intellectual appreciation".[12] Clarke holds that Pennell demonstrated a "continuity" between "her thoughts on other types of taste".[12]

Cookbook collecting

To enable her to write these light but erudite columns, Pennell bought cookbooks to use as reference material. At one point she owned more than 1000 volumes, including a rare

first edition of Hannah Glasse, which led to her becoming, in the view of culinary historian Cynthia D. Bertelsen, "one of the most well-known cookbook collectors in the world".[5] Pennell compiled a bibliography of her culinary library, which appeared first in articles for The Atlantic and then in a book entitled My Cookery Books, focussing on C17 and C18 English writers. Much of this collection eventually went to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress, where curator Leonard N. Beck gave it a professional evaluation, pairing her collection with that of food chemist Katherine Bitting[13] See the Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection.[14] The title, Two Loaf-Givers, refers to the Old English etymology of "lady"; a digital version is available.[15]

Biographies

Following her success with Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennell wrote other biographies, producing in 1906 the first one of her uncle,

Neopagan religion of Wicca. The Pennells were friends and correspondents of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and they wrote a lengthy biography of him in 1911. (Her fellow art critic Lady Colin Campbell, whose famous portrait by Giovanni Boldini
Pennell had praised, was also close to Whistler.) Pennell also wrote a biography, after his death in 1928, of her husband.

Cycle tourism

See also: Bicycling and feminism
A Humber tandem tricycle, circa 1885

The final string to her bow was as a cyclist. She praised cycling in general, and the ease with which it enabled city dwellers to escape to the countryside, for its fresh air and views. She claimed that "there is no more healthful or more stimulating form of exercise; there is no physical pleasure greater than that of being borne along, at a good pace, over a hard, smooth road by your own exertions".[17] She disparaged racing (for men but especially for women), preferring long unpressured travel, and wondering if she had inadvertently "broken the record as a touring wheel-woman".[18]

She started off cycling in the 1870s, while she still lived in Philadelphia.[19] On moving to London, she and her husband exchanged their Coventry Rotary tandem tricycle for a Humber model, going on to experiment with a single tricycle, a tandem bicycle, and finally a single bicycle with a step-through ("dropped") frame.[20]

The first journey that she turned into a book was A Canterbury Pilgrimage, a homage to

Frances Willard recognised the transformative power of the bicycle. By the time the Pennells had gone Over the Alps on a Bicycle (1898), Annie Londonderry had already become the first woman to bicycle around the world. There was a ready audience for Robins Pennell's books, and the last-mentioned was chosen as a book of the month.[22]

Later life

The Pennells moved back to the United States towards the end of World War I, settling in New York City. After her husband's death, she moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, dying there in February 1936.[4] Their books, especially her significant cookbook collection (reduced to 433) and a 300-strong collection on fine printing and bibliography, were bequeathed to the Library of Congress. Her papers and those of her husband are held by university archives.

Pennell often made her contributions under pen names[23] such as "N.N." (No Name), "A.U." (Author Unknown) and "P.E.R." (her initials jumbled up).[8]

Publications

Library resources about
Elizabeth Robins Pennell
By Elizabeth Robins Pennell
  • Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Roberts Brothers, 1884, part of the "Famous Women" series)
  • A Canterbury Pilgrimage (Seeley & Co., 1885)
  • An Italian Pilgrimage (Seeley & Co., 1887) with Joseph Pennell.
  • Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1888) with Joseph Pennell.
  • Our Journey to the Hebrides (with Joseph Pennell) (1889)
  • The Stream of Pleasure: a Narrative of a Journey on the Thames from Oxford to London (with Joseph Pennell) (1891)
  • To Gipsyland (The Century Co., 1893)
  • Tantallon Castle (1895) (see Tantallon Castle
  • London's Underground Railways(1895)
  • The Feasts of Autolycus: the Diary of a Greedy Woman (1896). A compilation of the culinary essays she first published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Re-issued 1901 as The Delights of Delicate Eating. (Also, A Guide for the Greedy, by a Greedy Woman: being a new and revised edition of "The Feasts of Autolycus".) Reprinted in 2000 with an introduction by Jacqueline Block Williams.
  • Around London by Bicycle (1897)
  • Over the Alps on a Bicycle (1898) with Joseph Pennell
  • Lithography and Lithographers (1898) with Joseph Pennell (see also 1915)
  • My Cookery Books (1903). From the Collections at the Library of Congress
  • Charles Godfrey Leland: a Biography (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1906)
  • French Cathedrals, Monasteries and Abbeys, and Sacred Sites of France (New York, The Century Co.) 1909
  • Our House and the People in It (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1910) (Also Our House and London Out of Our Windows 1912.)
  • The Life of James McNeill Whistler (J. B. Lippincott company, 1911) with Joseph Pennell.
  • Our Philadelphia (1914) with Joseph Pennell.
  • Lithography and Lithographers (1915) with Joseph Pennell 'Not merely a new edition. The book is new though based upon the old!--(Preface) (see also 1898).
  • Nights: Rome & Venice in the Aesthetic Eighties, London & Paris in the Fighting Nineties (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1916)
  • The Lovers (W. Heinemann, 1917)
  • The Whistler Journal (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1921)
  • Italy's Garden of Eden (1927)
  • The Art of Whistler (1928)
  • The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell (1929)
  • Whistler the Friend (1930)
  • (anthologized in) American Food Writing: an Anthology with Classic Recipes, ed. Molly O'Neill (Library of America, 2007)
    ISBN 1-59853-005-4

References

  1. ^ Jacqueline Block Williams, introduction to 2000 reprint of The Delights of Delicate Eating
  2. ^ From the introduction to the 2000 reprint of The delights of delicate eating.
  3. ^ A Routledge literary sourcebook on Mary Wollstonecraft's A vindication of the rights of woman. Adriana Craciun, 2002, p36
  4. ^ a b "Biographical Sketch of Joseph and Elizabeth R. Pennell". Archived from the original on September 1, 2006. Retrieved May 9, 2007.
  5. ^ a b ""A Greedy Woman:The Long, Delicious Shelf Life of Elizabeth Robins Pennell". Cynthia D. Bertelsen. August 2009. Fine Books Magazine". Archived from the original on April 3, 2018. Retrieved July 18, 2011.
  6. ^ Robins, Anna Gruetzner. Walter Sickert: the Complete Writings on Art. Page 84. Oxford University Press, 2000.
  7. ^ Clarke, Meaghan. "New Woman on Grub Street: Art in the City". palgrave.com. Retrieved December 31, 2022.
  8. ^ a b "Bibliography of the New Art Criticism of Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1890–95)" by Kimberly Morse Jones. Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 270–287.
  9. ^ Introduction to 2000 reprint of The Delights of Delicate Eating
  10. ^ Wong, Alex. “The Gourmand as Essayist: Irony and Style in the Culinary Essays of Elizabeth Robins Pennell.” Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays, edited by Dave Buchanan and Kimberly Morse Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 153–71, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1hm8htz.13. Accessed 7 May 2022.
  11. ^ Forgotten Female Aesthetes:Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University of virginia Press. Talia Schaffer
  12. ^ a b Clarke, Meaghan. "Bribery with sherry and the influence of weak tea: Women Critics as Arbiters of Taste in the late Victorian and Edwardian Press" (PDF). manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 27, 2011.
  13. ISBN 0-8444-0404-7
    (0-8444-0404-7)
  14. ^ "Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection (Selected Special Collections: Rare Book and Special Collections, Library of Congress)". loc.gov.
  15. ^ "From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division". loc.gov.
  16. ^ Grimassi, Raven. Encyclopedia of Wicca & Witchcraft. Page 252. Llewellyn Worldwide, 2000.
  17. ^ "Cycling", in St. Nicholas. XVII (July 1890):732-40, cite in "In Praise of Bicycling and Women", Rambler Newsletter. part 1part 2
  18. ^ Robins Pennell, Elizabeth (1894). Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport. London: Ward & Downey. p. 264.
  19. ^ p 16 Over the Alps on Bicycle (1898). "I steered from the precipice and tried to come round with the dignity that befits my twenty years of cycling."
  20. ^ a b Robins Pennell, Elizabeth (1894). Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport. London: Ward & Downey. p. 250.
  21. ^ Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry's Extraordinary Ride By Peter Zheutlin. Page 33. Citadel Press, 2008
  22. ^ by Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture, July to December 1899
  23. ^ Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Page 14. Sage Publications Inc., 2005.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
Wikisource has the text of a 1921 Collier's Encyclopedia article about Elizabeth Robins Pennell.

Further reading

  • Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University of Virginia Press, 2008.
  • Morse Jones, Kimberly, Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism. Ashgate, 2015.
  • Buchanan, Dave and Kimberly Morse Jones, Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
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