Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855 - 1936)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

American writer. She grew up in Philadelphia but spent most of her adult life in London. Married the draftsman, etcher, lithographer and illustrator for books and magazines, Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) in June 1884.

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 (1798) by her widower William Godwin.

The Pennells were friends and correspondents of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and they wrote a lengthy biography of him in 1911. Pennell also wrote a biography, after his death in 1928, of her husband.

She also worked as an art and, later, a food critic, writing for periodicals including the Daily Chronicle and the Pall Mall Gazette.