Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1853-1936), author and art critic, and her husband Joseph (1857-1926), etcher/illustrator credited with elevating illustration to an art, traveled together and, while publishing many books and illustrations individually, collaborated in the making of some ten books of travel. I propose to examine their working relationship and its terms in order to address the following questions: how did their collaboration enable their work? in what ways was their collaboration gendered? what did they do, as collaborators, to guarantee publishers and an audience for their work? how does their work make use of the conventions of travel writing?
Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, the American (a weekly Philadelphia magazine), Philadelphia newspapers, Scribner's Magazine and its later incarnation, the Century, the London Chronicle, and the New York Nation. Her first book was a Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1884). Thereafter she published culinary books such as Feasts of Autolycus (1896); a biography of her uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland; a novel, The Lovers (1917); and Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell (1929).
Joseph Pennell was an etcher who produced over 900 etchings and mezzotint plates, some 621 lithographs, and innumerable drawings and water colors. The first to make the varied aspects of industry recognized subjects for the artist, he produced a series called "The Wonder of Work" in 1916. He illustrated books by Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, George W. Cable, F. Marion Crawford, and Williams Dean Howells; and he wrote several books, including Lithography and Lithographers (1898) and The Adventures of an Illustrator (1925).
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