ABSTRACT
Phyllis Robbins (1883–1972) compiled four volumes of scrapbooks, each in excess of a hundred pages, chronicling the career of Maude Adams (1872–1953), the star of James M. Barrie's The Little Minister (1897), Quality Street (1901), Peter Pan (1905), and What Every Woman Knows (1908), who reigned in popularity and profitability during the Golden Age of Broadway at the turn into the twentieth century. Robbins worshipped Adams from within the star's core fan base of young, unmarried white middle- and upper-class women. After Adams invited her backstage, Robbins became an intimate friend granted a rare glimpse into the private, closeted world that the star shared with her domestic partners. The contents of the four volumes provided the primary source material for the two biographies Robbins later published, Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait (1956) and The Young Maude Adams (1959), which remain largely definitive. As handmade artifacts, the scrapbooks themselves more directly record her play going and memorializing habits and illuminate crucial affective forces that animated Adams's life and career. Along with other papers Robbins bequeathed to Harvard's Houghton Library in 1965, the scrapbooks comprise the bulk of the Maude Adams Collection, the major Adams archive.
