Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Elizabeth Madox Roberts (October 30, 1881 – March 13, 1941) was a Kentucky novelist and poet, primarily known for her novels and stories set in central Kentucky's Washington County, including The Time of Man (1926), My Heart and My Flesh, The Great Meadow (1930) and A Buried Treasure (1931). Robert Penn Warren called The Time of Man a classic; the eminent Southern critic and Southern Review editor Lewis P. Simpson counted Roberts among the half-dozen major Southern renascence writers. Three book-length studies of her work, three collections of critical articles, a major conference on her 100th birthday, a collection of her unpublished poems, and a flourishing Roberts Society that generates 20-odd papers at its annual April conferences have yet to revive wide interest in her work.

Life

Born in Perryville, Kentucky, on October 30, 1881, Roberts grew up and spent most of her adult life in nearby Springfield, Kentucky. She was the second of eight children born to Simpson Roberts and Mary Elizabeth Brent Roberts, a Confederate soldier turned engineer and a school teacher. Roberts attended high school in Covington, Kentucky, before enrolling briefly at the University of Kentucky (then the State College of Kentucky) in 1900 but was forced to drop out after one semester because of her poor health. For the next ten years, Roberts taught elementary school in the Springfield area with her mother.

In 1910, she went to live for several years with her sister in Colorado and it was here that she contributed several poems to a little book of photographs of mountain flowers, which became her first published work (In the Great Steep's Garden, privately printed, 1915). On the recommendation of a professor friend, Roberts enrolled as a freshman at the University of Chicago at the age of 36 in 1917, avidly studying literature and philosophy and fulfilling a lifelong dream of acquiring a college education. At the University of Chicago, she joined the Poetry club, which included Glenway Wescott, Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, forming friendships and professional relationships. She graduated with a B.A. with honors in 1921, Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Fiske Prize for a group of poems she wrote which went on to be published as Under the Tree in 1922. After completing her education, Roberts returned to Springfield, Kentucky, where she would spend much of the rest of her life.