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.
The April 1865Dublin Review said the collection recalls . . . the awful state of the country—the corpses that were buried without coffins, and the men and women that walked the roads more like...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
Athenæum reviewer H. F. Chorley
, sandwiching his discussion of A Chaplet of Verses between those of two other works by earnest women, expressed some annoyance at its assured and zealous sectarianism and regretted...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
disliked The Lowest Room, believing it too much influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's falsetto muscularity.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
184
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford
wrote disapprovingly of HM
's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
Literary responses
Julia Pardoe
This book was praised by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Kadar
credits Pardoe and Catherine Gore
as the first British writers to observe the modern form of nationalism that was emerging in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth...
Literary responses
Sarah Williams
Geraldine Jewsbury
wrote a review of Twilight Hours for the Athenæum in which she describes SW
's work as promising, but unfulfilled and melancholy. The review explains that her life . . . seems to...
Literary responses
Frances Ridley Havergal
The Reverend Charles Tennyson Turner
offered high praise for several of FRH
's poems and noted that Miss Havergal, Sappho
and Mrs Browning
constitute my present female trio. There may be others lying perdues to...
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
179
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
also admired the ballads.
Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. University of Chicago Press.
90
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
The London Review was very positive, considering the writing the genuine utterance of a richly imaginative mind and of a very high order.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
28
The Spectator talked about CR
's genius and artistic discrimination. Other...
Literary responses
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Following her untimely death, writers such as Felicia Hemans
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
expressed regret that the extraordinary powers of MJJ
's mind (particularly remarkable, said Barrett Browning, in a woman) had failed to produce...
Literary responses
Caroline Bowles
A few months after publication, The Birth-Day was read with very much pleasure by the William WordsworthWordsworth
clan.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Mary Russell Mitford
discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
Literary responses
Sarah Williams
A. H. Miles
included a selection of SW
's work in The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century and the introduction by A. H. Japp
describes her work as distinguished by originality, breadth...
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
HM
was highly regarded by many other women writers of her day. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
pronounced her the most manlike woman in the three kingdoms (that is, in England, Scotland, and Ireland)...
Literary responses
Mary Howitt
Mary Russell Mitford
confided to Elizabeth Barrett
, who had been charmed by The Neighbours, that she thought the translations' lack of popularity a sign of the poor taste of English novel-readers. Ah! dearest...