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BOOK REVIEW

Robins, Elizabeth. The Convert. Edited by Emelyne Godfrey. Brighton, UK: Twentieth Century Vox (Victorian Secrets), 2014. 291 pp. ISBN 978-1-906469-49-8.

Reviewed by Carol Senf.

What is truly remarkable about The Convert is Robins’s ability to create the world as it existed in England at the turn of the century.  Although this highly readable novel focuses on a brief period in the life of its upper class heroine, Vida Levering (the primary convert of the title) and her relatives and friends, it also touches on the lives of their servants as well as other working men and women. Centring on the question of suffrage, The Convert also reveals the way in which technology, particularly the automobile, the telegraph, and the telephone, impacted people’s lives and on the changes that were taking place as the Conservative, Liberal, and Labour parties vied for control of both the law and the hearts of people in England.

The title refers to Vida’s dramatic transformation over the several months depicted in the story. Surrounded by men who are actively engaged in politics and women who are engaged in charitable works, she only gradually becomes invested in the suffrage cause and in the lives of other women. Robins uses Vida’s own words to describe the gradual changes that take place in her life. At one point she compares these changes to a religious conversion, “Why do we pretend that all conversion is to some religious dogma – why not to a view of life?” (142). Even after she has begun the pilgrimage from indifference to evangelism, she confesses to the Suffragette Miss Claxton that the change is difficult, “As I wrote you, I am not what you would call a convert. I’ve only got as far as the inquiry stage” (151). Focusing primarily on the question of getting votes for women, Robins also suggests other equally significant changes as the New Woman gains independence and transforms from the “old kind [ . . . ] whose idea of influence is to make men fall in love with them, whose idea of working is to put on a smart gown and smile their prettiest” (172).

Even though the novel centers on Vida, Robins indicates that, while some of Vida’s personal experiences (especially the fact that she is unmarried and plans never to marry) may be unusual, she shares a great deal with other women of her class, including her half-sister Janet, Jean Dunbarton, Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge, Lady John Ulland, and Sophia Borrodaile. Many of these women are actively engaged in child rearing and charitable works, but Robins also makes clear that men hold all the political and economic power and that even privileged women have very little control over their lives. Despite their interest in politics and willingness to campaign for particular candidates, Robins suggests that their lives are extremely circumscribed. For example, she has Janet apologise to her husband for ordering an extra copy of the Times because he dislikes having his copy looked at until he has finished reading it. Robins also reveals that the lives of society women are devoted to their husbands’ whims when she has Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge complain, “I’ve told Freddy that when I’ve departed for realms of bliss, he is to put on my tombstone, ‘Died of changing her clothes’” (221). Robins’s accompanying footnote explains to twenty-first-century readers why changing clothing would have been onerous. Society women would have “required different sets of clothing” for a range of activities and the daily ritual of meals, visiting and entertaining, and this changing of clothing and dressing and redressing one’s hair “was not a quick affair” (221, note 105).

Of course the problems of upper class women like Vida, Janet, and Mrs. Freddy pale beside those of their servants, women like Ernestine Blunt and other women who are courageous enough to stand up and speak for the cause of suffrage, and the unnamed women of the working classes.  For example, Vida is especially interested in revealing, “the degrading discomforts, the cruelties, that are practiced against homeless women even in some of the rare-supported casual wards and the mixed lodging-houses” (190).  She tells her friend Mrs. Heriot of meeting a young woman dying in a “tramp ward” (what we might today call a homeless shelter), who had been lured into prostitution after she missed her train and “was too terrified of her employer to dare to ring him up after hours” (209). She later shares the story of another young girl in Manchester who was tried for murdering her child:

a working girl – an orphan of seventeen – who crawled with the dead body of her new-born child to her master’s back door and left the baby there [ . . . ] Her master, a married man, had of course reported the ‘find’ at his back door to the police” (247).

While The Convert focuses on the lives of the upper classes, it also recognises that less privileged people face different kinds of problems.  If The Convert fails to depict the lives of working class individuals in great detail, it also reveals why the classes fail to understand one another. Not only do people of different classes live in different areas and have different educational experiences, they don’t read the same books and newspapers. One very interesting scene (its dramatic elements reveal that The Convert is a novelization of Robins’s play Votes for Women, 1907) depicts a conversation between Vida and Miss Claxton, one of the suffragettes. Vida believes that she is well informed because her brother-in-law subscribes to all the newspapers. However, when Miss Claxton asks Vida whether she reads the Clarion, the Labour Leader, and the Labour Record, however, both she and the reader recognise that people from different classes have very different sources of information. 

Despite the gulf that exists, Robins manages to demonstrate through the speeches of the suffragettes that certain injustices unite all women. The greatest evil is, “the helplessness of women” (208), but that helplessness is reinforced by repeated references to the fact that, while English men are justifiably proud of being able to face a jury of their peers, no English woman has that luxury.

Although readers would be justified in arguing that The Convert fails to do justice to the lives of working-class women (or men, for that matter, who are presented primarily as hecklers at various suffrage events), it does – especially through the voices of working-class suffragettes – touch on issues that faced all women at the turn of the century. Most importantly, it is a compelling and readable story of the conversion experience of one upper-class woman though Robins subtly weaves into Vida’s background numerous reasons that she would have been more likely to understand the plight of working-class women. Born into privilege, she had left her father’s home after the death of her mother because she, “took offence at an ugly thing that was going on under my father’s roof” (211). Unable to make a living for herself, she is befriended by an old friend of the family, Geoffrey Stonor, a Conservative MP, and becomes pregnant. Fearing the wrath of both his father and his constituents, Stonor persuades Vida to have an abortion, an event that impacts the rest of her life and explains the aloofness with which she approaches life even though she seems to resume the life of a society woman. Living with her half-sister Janet and brother-in-law, Donald Fox-Moore, Vida is greatly admired by her circle of friends who all wonder why she doesn’t marry. Because her conversion happens gradually, it is extremely convincing, and Robins does an excellent job of demonstrating how difficult it is for people to rid themselves of long-established prejudices. 

A less convincing conversion takes place in the last 20 pages of the novel when Stonor, who is now engaged to the Scottish heiress Jean Dunbarton, is persuaded by Vida to support the suffrage movement both to make amends for his earlier callous treatment of her and to avoid the threat of a scandal.

Because Elizabeth Robins is unlikely to be a household name for most of the people who will encounter The Convert, either in a college class or on their own, Emelyne Godfrey has supplemented this edition with materials that will put Robins’s suffragette novel into historical perspective: a chronology of Robins’s life (which reveals that she shared a number of life experiences with her heroine), a brief – some might say too brief – bibliography of supplemental materials, a thoughtful introduction, excellent footnotes to explain allusions to people and organisations likely to be unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers, and four appendixes (contemporary reviews of The Convert, two flyers from the 1906 election, and excerpts from Glimpses into the Abyss by Mary Higgs [1906] and “Self-Defence” by Edith Garrud for the column “The World We Live In” [1910]).

While I thoroughly enjoyed The Convert because of its compelling and believable characters and interesting plot, it might be tough going for undergraduate students in a survey of literature class because of the dense historical context. In fact, it would be a better choice for the following groups: students of women’s history, the suffrage movement or political history (readers will gain insights into the differences among members of the Liberal, Conservatives, and Labour parties); students of the realist novel; students of fin de siècle literature. I dare say that many readers might not pick up the fact that Vida had been pregnant with Geoffrey Stonor’s illegitimate child and that he had encouraged her to have an abortion. In fact, the only hints to that traumatic event are Mrs. Heriot’s reference to finding Vida, “horribly ill in a lonely Welsh farmhouse” (214), a veiled allusion to “a shady-looking doctor – nameless, of course” (214), and Vida’s sorrow over the fact that, while Geoffrey is likely to have other children, she will have only the one. The same reticence is true of the “unholy handling” (159) that the suffragettes fear as much as imprisonment. 

Casual readers may not pick up on all the subtle sexual references, but they will probably see similarities to the political situation then and today. While the women’s suffrage movement was ultimately successful in terms of women’s getting the vote, inequities between men and women continue to exist as do problems with the police, and class differences prevent women from uniting on issues that impact all women. These issues would make The Convert an interesting choice for many college classes as well as for many book clubs.

Carol Senf is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches classes in Victorian Literature and Gender Studies.