This work is first full biography of Elizabeth Robins, American born writer and activist who began her professional life as actress. Robins secured her reputation as performer first in America (acting with James O'Neill, with the Edwin Booth Laurence Barrett tour, and at the Boston Museum Theatre). She relocated to London in 1888 and was one of a handful of enterprising actresses whose productions of Ibsen plays established the playwright's significance. She supplemented her income by publishing, first under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. When her identity was revealed by others in 1898, her success as author of The Open Question made her famous in the city which she fictionalized, her hometown of Zanesville, Ohio. Travel to Alaska to observe the Nome gold rush of 1900 was prompted by her two brothers who had traveled there in 1898. Two novels came from that experience. Events of the Women's Suffrage campaign in England transformed her writing in the first decades of the twentieth century. She turned her play, Votes for Women (1907) into the successful novel, The Convert. Her essays of her involvement in the suffrage issue were collected in 1913 as Way Stations and form an important profile of feminist activism. She exposed trafficking in young women with her sensational tale, My Little Sister, also 1913.