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.
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.
41
Literary responses
Mathilde Blind
This poem was greeted with a chorus of warm though not unqualified journalistic praise. The Athenæum called it one of the most noticeable and moving poems which recent years have added to our shelves.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3064 (17 July 1886): 76
Literary responses
Ouida
Critic Kenneth Churchill
argues that Ouida was the first English writer to chronicle the sense of growing disillusion
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Research.
43: 376
with the practical outcomes of the new state established in Italy by the Risorgimento. She...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
The Spectator greeted this collection effusively as without question the most promising of any first appearance in this century, except that of Keats
, and the Saturday Review asserted, presumably with reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Literary responses
Anna Wickham
Untermeyer
's introduction praised AW
's acid overtones of irony,
Untermeyer, Louis, and Anna Wickham. “Introduction”. The Contemplative Quarry; and, The Man with a Hammer, Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. vii - xv.
ix, x
and the unusual combination of lyricism and astringency in her work. It heralded her as the most typical and, in many ways, the...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Mary Russell Mitford
supposed from reading this book that its author was Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(9 March 1872): 298
She may, however, have been building on another's opinion, for the Athenæum reviewer found abundant...
Literary responses
Caroline Norton
The Athenæum pronounced in fairly sympathetic tones that this volume bore a pathetic and direct reference upon the position and fortunes of its writer, alluding to the bereavements enforced by inexorable laws that denied Norton...
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
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The book was reviewed by Louis Untermeyer
in the Dial. The American Review of Reviews propagated the opinion that these sonnets would take their place beside Mrs. Browning
's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'because...
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
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...
