This book is a bit of a hot mess. It can’t seem to decide what it is, nor do either of its authors seem up to the task they’ve set before themselves. Biography is a unique genre with its own set of challenges and traps, and when writing a biography of a creative, one expects a certain degree of literary analysis. What we get here is a hagiography that’s painfully thin on the actual literary or journalistic importance of the subject.
One of the core problems is an obvious lack of familiarity with the methods of biography, history, and literary analysis. The citations are not citations, but rather authorial research notes intended to somehow be useful to future researchers but instead insufficient to supporting large groups of claims, some of which turn out not to be properly sourced at all. Some of the sources are outdated where there is newer scholarship that contradicts the material presented. Further, sometimes the authors relied on Robinson’s own writings without verifying with an available independent source. On top of that, an editor who was themself familiar with Robinson’s work was needed, because there’s some paraphrased sections that are really quotations. I’m not crying plagiarism, but neither co-author seems to have done biography of someone who was a writer before and therefore seem to have veered a little closely to the sun.
Robinson is described in glowing terms, comparing her to later important figures rather than contemporaries or predecessors in order to present her as ahead of her time. Likewise, calling her “intrepid” and framing her as part of journalism history is rather a bit sly, since she wasn’t, for the most part, a *journalist. She was a columnist! She wrote advice and sometimes, political opinion columns. She did sometimes cover major news stories, although it seems to be more in the way that absolutely every columnist would have been (and does now), rather than as the primary reporter for her newspaper. This seems to be at least partly a result of the authors simply not being familiar with the time period and Robinson’s contemporaries.
The reading level is around middle grade, and I’m not sure that’s intentional. The writing style relies so heavily on common turns of phrase that I started hearing the book in my head as though narrated by James A. Fitzpatrick. Though the authors make much of Robinson’s political and “progressive” statements, the biography overall doesn’t really go into much detail on her actual public writing, failing at any serious attempt at literary analysis. The result is an uncritical biographer of someone whose importance is possibly over-stated. It’s rather disappointing, as I was looking forward to learning in depth about another early woman journalist.