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 indices to its bound volumes list both tales and serial tales without naming the authors—even though, as named on the pages where their work actually appears, they include such luminaries as Robert Buchanan
and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Swanwick
AS
declares at the outset her belief in the progressive development of the human race, and in the contribution that poetry makes to pushing on that development as well as to witnessing and recording it...
Friends with whom she maintained contact by correspondence included her neighbour Mary Russell Mitford
, who commented to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
that HET
had been wrong in her theory about the authorship of Jane Eyre...
Occupation
Frances Trollope
Her next idea was an exhibition of Dante
's Infernal Regions. Hervieu
painted the scenes, and the museum's own wax manipulator, Hiram Powers
, created the figures.
Hiram Powers
later became a celebrated sculptor...
Literary responses
Frances Trollope
Response to Michael Armstrong was strong, both among readers who accepted FT
's representation of child labour and among those who rejected her descriptions as too explicit. Among the series of Factory Acts passed this...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Tytler
ST
's career as a writer introduced her to many leading literary figures (especially those of Scots origin) whom she entertainingly describes in Three Generations.
Clearly delighted with the opportunity to mix in literary circles, ST
recorded her personal observations of these authors in Men and Women Met by the Way, the final 100-page-long section of her family autobiography...
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...
Textual Production
Queen Victoria
Initially, Victoria was unreceptive to the idea of widespread publication of her journal extracts, arguing (according to Helps in his Editor's Preface) that she had no skill whatever in authorship; that these were, for the...
Literary Setting
Linda Villari
In Change Unchanged is another of LV
's novels with a plethora of landscape description and hints of the autobiographical. Throughout the life journey of its protagonist, Edith Henderson, which includes the seclusion and loneliness...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
This book is a sympathetic defence of Italy (to which it is dedicated) and the fruits of the Risorgimento against those who seemed to MAWungenerous and unjust towards the struggling Italian State.
Ward, Mary Augusta. A Writer’s Recollections. Harper and Brothers.
349
Mrs Browning
Textual Production
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp
included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...