Abstract
‘There’s nothing that shakes my nerves like seeing a woman struggling and kicking in a policeman’s arms’, shudders Lord Borrodaile (Convert, p. 67). Robins was fascinated and also troubled by women’s supposed vulnerability and the restrictions this placed on their movements. Convert famously explores the brutality that women could experience in their campaigns for suffrage and considers some real-life methods of tackling violence. Robins’s writing is infused with illustrations of perilous everyday situations in which women could find themselves. The Sherlock Holmes stories present a multiplicity of scenarios in which Victorian men were required to defend themselves using physical force, a wide variety of everyday objects (such as the fire poker or the walking-stick) or a number of weapons of the time including the life-preserver (a cudgel which was weighted at one end). This chapter will show that what Doyle as a male writer did for the depiction of threat to men, Robins also achieved for danger to women.
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Notes
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 263.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago, 1999), p. 218.
Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 109.
Helen Corke, In Our Infancy: An Autobiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 163.
Lovat Dickson, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 161.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (London: Virago, 1999), p. 223.
Katherine Roberts, Papers from the Diary of a Militant Suffragette (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1910), p. 95.
Mary Richardson, Laugh a Defiance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953), p. 117.
Eleanor D. Longman and Sophy Loch, Pins and Pincushions (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), p. 128.
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© 2012 Emelyne Godfrey
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Godfrey, E. (2012). Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert. In: Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284563_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284563_5
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