What are you Reading? Part 7

In anticipation of summertime reading, we recently asked our faculty to tell us what they have been reading and the answers may surprise you!

This week's entry comes from Charles Cosgrove, Professor of Early Christian Literature.

Dr. Charles Cosgrove
Professor of Early Christian Literature

These days I am reading the books of Elizabeth Robins, an American novelist, feminist writer, and actor who was born during the Civil War and died in 1952. I discovered her recently-published “Alaska-Klondike Diary” while vacationing with my family in Alaska last summer. As an actor, Elizabeth Robins was the leading interpreter of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen when his works were first being performed in the late nineteenth century. Most of her acting was done in England where she tried to make a life for herself after her young husband committed suicide. In 1900, she traveled from London to Alaska to find her younger brother Raymond, who had left his budding career as a San Francisco lawyer to join the gold rush of 1897. When Elizabeth did not hear from him, she feared that he had died on his way to the Klondike. Then, a letter from him in 1899 told of his arrival in Nome and how he had undergone a profound Christian conversion. From certain details in this letter Elizabeth incorrectly inferred that he had become a Jesuit, which she thought a very bad thing! Worried about him, she made the trip to Alaska—alone and against the advice of friends and family; and she kept a diary of her trip, which was published in 1999 by the University of Alaska Press. Since reading the diary, I have also read her memoir, based on the diary, Raymond and I, which was written in the 1930s but not published until the 1950s. 

Raymond Robins had in fact become not a Jesuit but a Congregationalist minister; he served a little fledgling church in Alaska for a year; went on to engagement in social work in Chicago from about 1902–1905; was a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 1906–1909; became a leading figure in the National Christian Social Evangelistic campaign of 1915; joined the Progressive Party; and went to Russia in 1917 to facilitate diplomatic relations between the United States and the Bolshevics, and was active in American politics and social causes after his return.

After reading Raymond and I, which concentrates on Elizabeth’s journey to Alaska and her time with her brother in Nome, I read The Magnetic North (1904), her fictionalized account of Raymond’s harrowing gold-rush experiences in the winter of 1897/1898, when he traveled with a small group of gold seekers up the Yukon River, which froze during their journey. I am now reading her novel ‘Come and Find Me!’ (1908) about a young woman’s journey to Alaska, which is told in ways that reflect much of Robins’ own experience. Next, I will read her feminist nonfiction writings, including The Open Question (1898). Sadly, there is no visual record of her acting, apart from a few still photographs. She did not go from stage acting to film acting but instead concentrated only on writing after 1900. In 1928 she applied her skill as a writer to her memories as an actor in a revealing reflection called Ibsen and the Actress. I plan to read that, too.