Elvina Mary Corbould was born in 1849 in Islington, then a comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class district on the northern edge of London proper. She was the eldest of the four children of Henry Heath Corbould and his wife Ann; Henry was a member of the Corbould family of Sussex and London which produced an impressive number of artists, including two of Henry's brothers, over at least three generations. Elvina was sent to St. Mary's school in Bury St. Edmund's, but in the same year that she was recorded there on the 1861 census, her father, a doctor, died at the age of forty, leaving Ann with four children, the youngest less than a year old. Perhaps as a result, by the time of the next census in 1871, Elvina was recorded as a governess, presumably to at least the youngest of the family's five sons, in the household of Aster R.C. Corbould, a first cousin of her father's and already a noted artist. Three years later, Elvina published her first books at the age of about twenty-three, The Ladies' Knitting Book and The Ladies' Crochet Book, demurely credited on the title pages to "E.M.C." These were the first of many instruction books on a variety of needlework subjects, most of which, gratifyingly, ran to multiple printings and editions.
In 1893, in her early forties, she married Mark Anthony Robinson of Brighton, a surgeon. Robinson died in December 1911, but a few months earlier, Elvina had been enumerated on the 1911 census, though noted as "married", living with her mother and unmarried youngest brother (an artist), at no.6 Ruvigny Mansions in Putney (which was apparently Ann's family home), on the banks of the Thames. (It seems likely that Elvina and her husband were living apart because of his illness.) By the 1930s at least, Elvina was living at 24, Queen's Square, Bath, where she died 6 October 1936.
In addition to needlework manuals, Corbould published other didactic works including Side-Lights on Shakspere with Louise Rossi in 1897, Pitman's Studies in Elocution in 1909 ("A guide to the theory and practice of the art of public speaking, reciting, and reading") and Sweet Little Rogues (1876), her only exercise in fiction.
The frontispiece to Sweet Little Rogues. Note the "comforters" worn by all three of the children! (The illustrations are uncredited; it is entirely possible, given the artistic bent of many of the Corboulds, that they were drawn by Elvina herself.)
