Elizabeth Robins Pennell
A researcher summed her up in a work published in 2000 as "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic";[1] in addition, she wrote travelogues, mainly of European cycling voyages, and memoirs, centred on her London salon.
She started with articles in periodicals such as Atlantic Monthly, and through this work she met a young Quaker artist named Joseph Pennell, who had also had to face down parental disapproval to pursue his creative calling.
[3] Pennell's biography drew on three main sources: Godwin's Memoirs; a London publisher named Charles Kegan Paul, who had written a sketch about the husband and wife a few years previously; and a curator at the British Library, Richard Garnett.
[4] The couple accepted a travel writing commission from The Century Magazine and set off for Europe, making several cycling journeys, in 1884 from London to Canterbury and then in 1885 through France.
Her uncle had travelled widely in Europe and settled in London, and so did the Pennells, basing themselves in the British capital for more than thirty years, with frequent visits to the Continent.
For many years they opened their home on Thursday evenings as a literary and artistic salon; some of the people who enjoyed their hospitality included: "critics Sir Edmund Gosse and William Archer; artists Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeill Whistler; authors Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw; and publishers John Lane and William E.
[6] Scholar Meaghan Clarke ties "real-life women art journalists" such as Pennell to the literary figures and hacks that populate George Gissing's New Grub Street, as well as to the concept of the New Woman.
She wrote critically of Walter Besant’s People’s Palace at Mile End (similar in spirit to Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s St Jude's at Whitechapel).
[8] Pennell's place in the literary history of cooking and eating has recently been reappraised, as she "paved the way for food writers such as Elizabeth David, M. F. K. Fisher, and Jane Grigson," according to Jacqueline Block Williams.
At one point she owned more than 1000 volumes, including a rare first edition of Hannah Glasse, which led to her becoming, in the view of culinary historian Cynthia D. Bertelsen, "one of the most well-known cookbook collectors in the world".
[15] Following her success with Mary Wollstonecraft, Pennell wrote other biographies, producing in 1906 the first one of her uncle,[16] Charles Leland, who had written, or compiled, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), a book very influential in the development of the Neopagan religion of Wicca.
She claimed that "there is no more healthful or more stimulating form of exercise; there is no physical pleasure greater than that of being borne along, at a good pace, over a hard, smooth road by your own exertions".
Over the next few years, the pair took several trips together, including another literary pilgrimage, this time on the trail of Laurence Sterne's 1765 travel novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
