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.
Rossetti also reported that Browning wished to meet ES
, but that he did so only briefly and that Elizabeth Barrett Browning
was not well enough to call.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Editors Doughty, Oswald and John Robert Wahl, Clarendon Press.
1: 281
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...
Performance of text
Michelene Wandor
The fringe theatre group Mrs Worthington's Daughters
toured with MW
's verse play, Aurora Leigh, adapted from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's novel-in-verse.
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. Plays by Women: Volume One. Methuen.
135
politics
Queen Victoria
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
is one of the best known authors whose works address, explicitly and implicitly, QV
and the figure of a female monarch. Eventually deemed The Queen of Poetry herself, Barrett Browning used her...
politics
May Sinclair
It was an act of great courage for MS
to make herself so conspicuous. Cicely Hamilton
and Catherine Gasquoine Hartley
led the procession. Members of the WWSL each carried a goose quill and a bannerette...
Author summary
George Sand
French writer George Sand
(Aurore Dudevant) wrote over one hundred novels and plays. Her correspondence fills twenty-five volumes. She averaged two novels a year after 1831. British writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and George Eliot
Author summary
Jean Ingelow
JI
's writings spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and led to an immense popularity during her lifetime. She published five volumes of poetry, eighteen works for children, five novels, and a verse...
Author summary
Mathilde Blind
MB
was one of the leading poets of the later nineteenth century; her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work. Her poetry combines great beauty of sound...
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...
Publishing
Blanche Warre Cornish
BWC
's eccentric but unforgettable bons mots were collected in Cornishiana, a little book with an unusual publishing history. Logan Pearsall Smith
, first collector of her sayings, cast doubt on his own very...
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...
Publishing
Harriet Martineau
There is no complete edition of her letters, many of which remain unpublished. Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood, edited by Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle
, appeared in 1983. Valerie Sanders
edited Harriet Martineau: Selected...
Publishing
Amy Levy
At thirteen AL
published The Ballad of Ida Grey in the feminist journal The Pelican; an essay by her on Elizabeth Barrett
's Aurora Leigh had already appeared in the children's magazine Kind Words.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
18, 31n4, 277
Reception
Mary Howitt
The assessment of her literary contribution has been negatively impacted by the fact that she published much work in periodicals and wrote much for children and the working classes. Her collaboration with her husband was...
Reception
Alice Meynell
To many of her contemporaries (especially male contemporaries), AM
symbolised the perfection of Woman and Mother. Many descriptions of her suggest Woolf
's Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Coventry Patmore
and Francis Thompson