Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert

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.