Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
-
Standard Name: Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Birth Name: Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett
Nickname: Ba
Pseudonym: EBB
Married Name: Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Browning
Used Form: E. B. Barrett
Used Form: Elizabeth B. Barrett
Used Form: Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
Used Form: E.B.B.
Used Form: E. B. B.
EBB
was recognized in her lifetime as one of the most important poets of mid-Victorian Britain. She wrote a significant corpus of poetry which ranges from the lyric through the closet drama or dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue to the epic, as well as letters and criticism. For much of the twentieth century, interest in her focused on her romantic life-story, her letters, and Sonnets from the Portuguese. Late in the century, critical interest in her epic female künstlerroman or verse novel Aurora Leigh and her other political poetry—in which she took up the causes of working-class children, the abolition of slavery, women's issues, and the Italian Risorgimento—revived. She is again considered one of the leading and most influential voices of her day.
When EN
asked Bernard Shaw
to review the first Lays and Legends for To-Day, he responded with a pretend review contained in a letter, a masterpiece in faint praise: The author has a fair...
Friends, Associates
Florence Nightingale
Around this time FN
became acquainted with other literary women as well. In July 1852 George Eliot
, who had become her correspondent, remarked in another letter that there is a loftiness of mind about...
CN
followed her poetry volume with Eglantine; or, The Family of Fortescue, an unusual novel whose dedication to Lady Shepherd
is dated 20 July.
Lady Shepherd is presumably Lady Mary Shepherd, who published philosophical...
Reception
Caroline Norton
She treated her own request as if it were just any appeal for patronage: I do not know if there be any precedent for appointing a female poet laureate even in a Queen's reign...
Literary responses
Caroline Norton
The Athenæum pronounced in fairly sympathetic tones that this volume bore a pathetic and direct reference upon the position and fortunes of its writer, alluding to the bereavements enforced by inexorable laws that denied Norton...
Textual Production
Eliza Ogilvy
Decades after she had ceased to publish her own poetry, EO
wrote a memoir of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
for a new edition of Barrett Browning's Poems.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Ogilvy, Eliza et al. “Introduction and Appendices”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, Quadrangle, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
xix
Author summary
Eliza Ogilvy
EO
is mainly recognized as a poet who wrote sometimes innovative lyrics on a wide range of topics from experiences of motherhood to contemporary politics. Beginning in the 1840s, she published five volumes of poetry...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Ogilvy
In the summer of 1849, the Ogilvys moved into an apartment above that of Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in Casa Guidi, Florence.
Ogilvy, Eliza et al. “Introduction and Appendices”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, Quadrangle, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
xiv
The families became good friends; according to Barrett Browning, quick...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Ogilvy
EO
's and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's special relationship was centred around Eliza
's children, who were important to both the origin and continuation of the friendship.
Ogilvy, Eliza et al. “Introduction and Appendices”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, Quadrangle, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
xxii
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
The friendship between EO
and Elizabethran the course of most friendships, vacillating between spirited intimacy and formal disagreement.
Ogilvy, Eliza et al. “Introduction and Appendices”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, Quadrangle, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
xiv
Barrett Browning always spoke of Ogilvy highly, but even though the friendship between the two...
Literary responses
Eliza Ogilvy
One critic felt that Mrs. Ogilvy is among those who have listened too long and too submissively to Tennyson
and the BrowningsRobert Browning
.
Ogilvy, Eliza et al. “Introduction and Appendices”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley, Quadrangle, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
xviii
Textual Features
Eliza Ogilvy
To the Poets of the New Generation addresses a generation which seems almost a throwback to the learned hermits of ancient days, who held aloof from war and suffering, and prayed in unintelligible languages. EO
Textual Features
Eliza Ogilvy
The earliest poems in the volume return to the experience of losing a child. A Remembrance, the opening poem, applies to this a most unexpected image. A ship grounds offshore, and seems about to...
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Meyers, Terry L. “Swinburne Reshapes His Grand Passion: A Version by ’Ashford Owen’”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
