Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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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.
CC
's friends and acquaintances were varying and numerous. In her youth the radical politician John Cartwright
was a neighbour. Her literary work as an adult led to the formation of a number of lasting...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Camilla Crosland
Since she was well-connected in London literary circles, she was able to include in her memoir recollections of time spent working with the annuals and of literary figures such as Grace Aguilar
, Lady Blessington
Literary responses
Camilla Crosland
CC
enjoyed moderate success during her life. Her writings earned her a modest income (in the 1840s it was about fifty pounds a year) and the critics were generally complimentary.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
A review in the Morning...
Occupation
Camilla Crosland
She worked a number of jobs that included teaching (she was a governess who attended her pupils by the day and did not live in), jewelry-making, and needlework. In the 1840s she was making about...
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ella Hepworth Dixon
Ella's elder sister Edith
, who also wrote and who was a friend of Penn Browning
(son of Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
), died at the age of twenty-two.
Dixon, Ella Hepworth. "As I Knew Them". Huchinson, 1930.
21, 44, 50-1, 228
Intertextuality and Influence
George Douglas
People in Cherry Garth think Denis strange and unladylike; Celia dissembles her jealousy, but does not forgive; Denis's only sympathiser is the Jewish farmer Octave Von Donop, a close friend of Tom's and another avowed...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Douglas
These extreme events are related in a matter-of-fact style that makes them real: GD
handles well such ordinary complexities of life as mixed feelings (Jack loves Maud, but loves Lucy as well; Maud at five...
Textual Production
Eliza Dunlop
Nearly a decade before Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, but following William Wordsworth
's Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman and Felicia Hemans
's The Indian Woman's Lament...
Education
Toru Dutt
TD
and Aru
were briefly enrolled at a boarding school in Nice where they studied French.
Rao, Raja, and Toru Dutt. “Aru and Toru”. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, Writers Workshop, 1972.
After moving to England they continued their studies and attended the Higher Lectures for Women series begun by Henry Sidgwick
Publishing
George Eliot
The first number of the Westminster Review to appear under her anonymous (and unpaid) editorship was that of January 1852, which was also the first under John Chapman
's ownership. One of her own contributions...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
Armgart is a poignant delineation of the conflict for the nineteenth-century woman artist between ambition and conventional femininity, and indeed constitutes a response to Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh. Its protagonist, an ambitious and...
Textual Features
Sarah Stickney Ellis
In a poem that can be seen as belonging to the emerging genre of the verse novel, SSE
takes up the question of the role of poetry in industrialised society, in conjunction with the theme...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Faithfull
The novel brings together the fashionable upper-class society which EF
had experienced in her youth, with the question of women's employment which was the burning issue of her working life. She acknowledges the work of...
