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.
Educated at Sandhurst
, RHH
started writing and editing in his thirties after a spell in the Mexican navy. His verse was praised by Thomas Carlyle
and Edgar Allan Poe
. He also adapted plays...
Occupation
Richard Hengist Horne
Reports such as Horne's also provided writers of protest literature such as Benjamin Disraeli
, Charles Dickens
, and Elizabeth Gaskell
with material which they incorporated into their fiction. Elizabeth Barrett
's The Cry of...
Occupation
Elizabeth Siddal
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...
Occupation
Coventry Patmore
Its conservative gender politics coupled with its immense popularity made The Angel in the House a target of criticism for feminists. There are oblique references to it in Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh (1857)...
Occupation
Eliza Fenwick
It now seems that EF
was not the Mrs Fenwick who was running an admirable school at Flint House, Greenwich, just outside London, from at least the later 1780s well into the 1790s...
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...
Literary responses
Harriet Hamilton King
Eric Robertson
in English Poetesses, 1883, suggested that HHK
's writings excelled those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
on the same topic in their truth and spontaneity.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
Other British women writers also found their admiration mingled with disapprobation. Elizabeth Barrett
read GS
eagerly and recognised her importance, but reflected the opinion of many in often finding the writing inappropriate for a woman...
Literary responses
Dora Greenwell
The Athenæum reviewer predicted a career of continued success for DG
: her present is full of promise, her future full of hope. . . . Let her only get more experience into fewer words...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The first Dictionary of National Biography praised AW
's abilities as a poet and claimed a lasting place for her in the English poetic tradition, but by 1914 Watts-Dunton was complaining about her exclusion from...
Literary responses
Mathilde Blind
Reviewers loved this volume. They praised MB
's power of characterisation in The Prophecy of St Oran, the sonorous beauty of her lines
Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. Chatto and Windus.
2
combined with simple and straightforward vocabulary, her dramatic power, and...
Literary responses
Amelia Opie
AO
's novels, which formed a comparatively minor part of her output, had an impact beyond the rest of her work. Literary historian Gary Kelly
notes that when they were new they commanded among the...
Literary responses
Una Marson
A review in the Jamaica Times described UM
as a fine talent
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press.
41
and likened one of her sonnets, Vows, to those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press.
