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.
During the same year she worked on translating Balzac
for young English readers, a scheme suggested to her by her discussions with Elizabeth Barrett Browning
about French fiction.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 196
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
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...
Textual Production
Sophia Jex-Blake
Jex-Blake's essay was heavily influenced by her relationship with Dr Lucy Sewall
. By her late twenties, Sewall had established a national reputation for her work as a woman doctor. SJB
also drew on a...
Textual Production
Muriel Box
MB
wrote poetry during adolescence, stopped writing it during her first marriage, and began again when that ended. She suspected that either acute stress or intense happiness was necessary for her to produce it.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin.
prelims
Textual Production
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
published Records of Tennyson
, Ruskin
, and Browning (which also covers Elizabeth Barrett Browning
).
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
224
Textual Features
Annie S. Swan
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...
Textual Features
Augusta Webster
The volume also includes several poems about shipwrecks and drownings, likely a reflection of AW
's nautical childhood. The Bitter Knight, Cruel Agnes, and Edith deploy traditional refrains in ways reminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The other poems in the collection touch on the Crystal Palace (recently moved to its permanent home in Sydenham just south of London), Emanuel Swedenborg
, and MCH
's father, Joseph Hume
.
Hume, Mary Catherine. Normiton. J. W. Parker and Son.
prelims
Textual Features
Toni Morrison
The protagonist of the novel, Sethe, is a mother bereaved by slavery, herself a slave who ran awayfrom the ironically-named Sweet Home in Kentucky to Ohio, when the institution of slavery was nearing its...
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
Emily Dickinson
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...
Textual Features
Anne Mozley
Wordsworth observed of her poetry anthologies in general that they mixed the contemporary with the canonical: Spenser
, Cowley
. . . stand side by side with Monckton Milnes
and Miss Barrett
.
Wordsworth, John, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, p. xii - xx.
ix
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...
