Elizabeth Robins Pennell

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 recent researcher summed her up as "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic"; in addition, she wrote travelogues, mainly of European cycling voyages, and memoirs, centred on her London salon. Her biographies included the first in almost a century of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, one of her uncle the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, and one of her friend the painter Whistler. In recent years, her art criticism has come under scrutiny, and her food criticism has been reprinted.

She grew up in Philadelphia. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was sent away to a convent school from the ages of 8 to 17. When she returned to her father's home, he had remarried, and she was bored with the demands and restrictions of being a proper Catholic young lady. She wanted to work, and, with the encouragement of her uncle, the writer and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, she took up writing as a career. She started with articles in periodicals such as 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.

Her first book was the first full-length biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) since the hastily published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by her widower William Godwin. Pennell's biography drew on three main sources: Godwin's Memoirs; a London publisher named Charles Kegan Paul, who had written a sketch about the husband and wife a few years previously; and a curator at the British Library, Richard Garnett. It was published in 1884 by 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.

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