The Convert

by Elizabeth Robins, Jane Marcus (Introduction)

   This novel, first published in 1907, brings to life Robin's experience and that of her colleagues, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, in the story of Vida Levering, an upper-class British woman "converted" to the working-class suffrage movement. In a suspenseful plot, Robins contrasts the witty dialogue of elegant drawing rooms with the rough-and-tumble outdoor meetings of Trafalgar Square, recreating them almost word for word from actual accounts. Ultimately, Vida begins to make her own first speeches and out of the tragic events of her past devises a means of effecting women's political freedom. Jane Marcus puts this "funny, moving, and beautifully structured novel" in a class with Virginia Woolf's Night and Day .

Genres: Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, Feminism

320 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1980

About the author

Elizabeth Robins (August 6, 1862 – May 8, 1952) was an actress, playwright, novelist, and suffragette.

Robins realised her income from acting was not stable enough to carry her. While Robins was busy being a successful actress, she had to leave England to look for her brother in Alaska, who had gone missing. Her experiences searching for her brother led her to write her novels, Magnetic North (written in 1904) and Come and Find Me (1908). Before this, she had written novels such as George Mandeville’s Husband (1894), The New Moon (1895), Below the Salt and Other Stories (1896) and several others under the name of C. E. Raimond. She explained her use of a pseudonym as a means of keeping her acting and writing careers separate but gave it up when the media reported that Robins and Raimond were the same. She enjoyed a long career as a fiction and nonfiction writer.

In her biography of Elizabeth Robins, Staging a Life, Angela John says, “It is possible to trace in Elizabeth’s writing from 1890s onwards an emerging feminist critique, clearly, but only partly, influenced by the psychological realism of Ibsen, which would find most confident expression in 1907 in her justly celebrated novel The Convert”. Robins’ main character, Vida, speaks to “male politicians and social acquaintances”, something very different from what the women of Robins’ time did – something very reminiscent of one of Ibsen’s ‘new women.’ Adapted from this novel is, Elizabeth Robins’ most famous play, Votes for Women! The first play to bring the “street politics of women’s suffrage to the stage”, Votes for Women! led to a flourish of suffrage drama. Elizabeth Robins first attended “open-air meetings of the suffrage union” when the Women’s Social and Political Union moved its headquarters from Manchester to London in 1906. It was then that she “abandoned” the current play she was writing and worked to complete the very first suffrage drama. “The more Robins became immersed in the work, the more she became converted to the cause”.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most people today probably do not know that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries a number of British suffragists wrote what were called "conversion" novels about women coming to agree with the principles of women's suffrage. These were fictional but often resemble the accounts published by actual suffragists.

The author was an American who moved to Britain and became friends with Henry James, H.G. Wells, and other famous writers and intellectuals of the day.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[W]hen I hear a man like you explaining in that superior way how immensely he doesn't care, I seem to see that that is precisely the worst indictment against your class.

[O]pen laughter is less dangerous laughter. It's even a guide; it helps us to find out things some of us wouldn't know otherwise. Lots of women used to be taken in by that talk about about feminine influence and about men's immense respect for them! But any number of women have come to see that underneath that old mask of chivalry was a broad grin.

It seemed as if he preferred to have her angry rather than oblivious of him.

On the last day of Women's History Month 2018, there are few books I can think of that would be better to review than this one. I will admit, this isn't the most well written book under the sun. Hell, I myself had a hard time following along or caring about the story and its thematic concerns for a good fifty or so pages, leastwise until the stakes were raised and the textual tidbits of genius began to flow forth., What this work is is important, especially in this day and age when I can't answer a questionnaire about reading habits with my demographically oriented plan without one or two or five flustered white boy wonders throwing a hissy fit over my consciously minimized engagement with the history of their collective output. It's microaggressions such as these that have played the largest role in the neglecting of a work written in 1907 on such historically important issues, and now that I've stopped making my profile private, it's more important than ever to sound out the laughs and the scorn and preempt their energy sapping arrival at my doorstep. Women's suffrage, women's safety, women's right to read whatever the fuck they want. 1907 was a long time ago, and there's no reason to be ingratiatingly polite or complicitly silent now.

[W]omen are such fragile flowers. I saw some of those fragile flowers last week—and I'll tell you where. Not a very good place for gardening. It was a back street in Liverpool...At Cradley Heath we make chains. At the pit brow we sort coal. But a vote would soil our hands. You may wear out women's lives in factories, you may sweat them in the slums, you may drive them in the streets. You do. But a vote would unsex them.

The poor wanting work, wanting decent housing—wanting bread—and offered a little cultivated companionship.

You ridicule and denounce these women for trying peacefully—yes, I say peacefully—to get their rights as citizens. Do you know what our fathers did to get ours? They broke down Hyde Park railings, they burnt the Bristol Municipal Buildings, they led riots, and they shed blood. These women have hurt nobody.

That stakes have become more profuse since 1907, and antiblackness and queerness and disability amongst multitudes of other issues have complicated the lines drawn in the sands of political activity and governmental crackdowns. Despite this, this novel covers the bare bones necessary to any movement: solidarity, stocism, compassion, generosity, respect, public speaking, rhetorical reasoning, self defense, electioneering know how, diverse representation, self awareness, self care, and a refusal to ever be satisfied with the scraps while one is refused a seat at the table. The battle takes place as much in the domicile as it does in the streets as it does on the Web as it does internationally, as a vicious parasite such as the patriarchy would not have survived for so long without its cultivations of respectability politics and marginalized violence and other forms of herding one away from or against the other to the point that the infighting does the conglomeration's insidious logic puzzles and paradoxes and lies' job for them. This novel doesn't cover the majority of different ways women can be singled out and terrorized and/or exhausted and/or shamed into complaisance, but it displays enough disparate yet structurally similar cases to offer a working model is fought from the drawing rooms of the ultra wealthy to the slums of the raped. As mentioned previously, the prose is not the prettiest, and the multiple plot lines take a while to coalesce into each other, but the revelation is strong enough to act as both climax and raison d'être for the piece's entirety, so what haphazardly started pulled itself together, marvelously in some places, by the end. Judging by the rating, the GR mainstream is pulling its usual apolitical horseshit, but I'm personally glad that the 500 Great Books By Women and a special indie bookstore worked in tandem to bring me this work when it did, for if one read's like everyone else, one thinks like everyone else, and considering what a rapist mess the controllers of public opinion enable, 'everyone else' is well worth overcoming.

She is worthy to do the highest work given to humanity, to bear and to bring up children; she is worthy to teach and to train them; she is worthy to pay the taxes that she has no voice in levying. If she breaks the law that she has no share in making, she is worth hanging, but she is not worth consulting about her own affairs—affairs of supremest importance to her very existence—affairs that no man, however great and good, can understand so well as she.

How should they be expected to know how to treat women? What example do they have? Don't they hear constantly in the courts how little it costs a man to be convicted of beating his own wife?...Stealing is far more dangerous; yes, even if a man's starving. That's because bread is often dear and women are always cheap.

You'll never know how many things are hidden from a woman in good clothes. The bold free look of a man at a woman he believes to be destitute—you must feel that look on you before you can understand—a good half of history.

This book truly is a buried gem, merging as it does literary aspiration with practical application. Stilted as it is at times, I chalk that up to the author having been actor for a longer period than they had been writer, and the play of this novel may very well display the sort of holistic integrity that this plain old text can't hope to capture. I wouldn't mind seeing it if given the opportunity, and also wouldn't mind recommending this book to others who are sick of the truncated treatments the end of the 19th spanning the beginning of the 20th are usually granted, smashed as they are between the sensationalized events of the 1860s and the 1910s. Contrary to bloated belief, there were women writing in the 1900s beyond the few over blown names, there were women writers who actually walked the talk of other pages, and there was nothing natural about the world waking up one day to women having the right to vote. The UK certainly wasn't the first place where this happened, but it's certainly one of the more visible, and the basic structure found in those pages is well worth adapting for today.

I tell you that cry was the beginning of a new chapter in human history. It began with "Shame!" but it well end with "Honour."

[Mo]

See if this is available at Project Gutenberg.

[D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent story, one of a number of 'conversion' stories written at the time when the women's suffragette movement was really cranking up. Like many books of its time, it's a slow read and not very well written, taking too long to get to the juicier sections. Those are a series of speeches, and therefore disconnected from a driving narrative.

So three stars for that. What elevates this piece is the fact that's it's all basically real. These were actual speeches that inspired the movement, real moments in history. Fascinating and startlingly, depressingly relevant to today.

The opening chapters are important in establishing the type of character who is blasé and unaffected by politics, and the world she lives in, one of casual sexism. So be aware that some patience will be required when picking up this book. I felt it was worth it to get to the juicier parts.

Our heroine begins her journey in the disconnected witticism-rife dining rooms and drawing rooms of the upper class. She then encounters women from broader aspects of life and sees how the things that grant her a warm bed and regular meals are used to control people at a different level of society.

The narrative is pretty much abandoned at this point in favour of the speeches. It's good to get some context, but working in more developed writing is not something really done at the time. This book did not go through a story editor, then a scene editor, then a line by line, as most books do today. So do forgive it for that and just try to absorb the atmosphere that is hinted at (and only hinted at because the people at the time were living it and needed little more than hints). The points being made are worth it.

[Cara Blacklock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this!
It brought back many memories from my A-Level history coursework on female suffrage- I wish this book was more widely in print so I could have read it at that time. Coming directly from the time of the campaign the speeches this book transcribes are rather affecting and still very relevant. Shame about the end though…. Really ruined the power of the whole novel… It’s strong points are definitely it’s political points, the narrative is rather threadbare (although the fictional dimension did get off to a promising start.. it was just rushed and almost abandoned by the end..)

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a compelling narrative centering around the suffrage movement of the late 19th century. It is delightful as a submersion into that world by an author of the era, letting readers see it through eyes and from angles seldom as well documented.

I found the main character's rise to the cause compelling, but the climax was decidedly less so. That caveat aside, my disappointment with the ending did not diminish my enjoyment of the journey and I think it is still a very worthy read for anyone interested in the political experiences of women of that era.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

some nice insights about sexism and misogyny. But too many characters who 1) lack distinguishing features and 2) appear only once or twice. It's impossible to keep track of everyone, and after a while, I stopped trying, which meant I stopped caring. The plot is pretty thin, considering the length. The real point is to create a setting for the political speeches, and although I appreciate the goals of those speeches, it doesn't make for especially fiction.

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great read about a woman's feminist awakening in the early years of First Wave feminism. If you think it was brave to put your neck on the block and divorce your husband in the Seventies, try getting up on stage and talking about how you've decided never to marry at all in the Edwardian era.