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 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...
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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
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Agnes Giberne
A dedication to the memory of her mother quotes Not lost, but gone before (the title of a story by Margaret Gatty
).
Giberne, Agnes. Beside the Waters of Comfort. Seeley.
prelims
The book takes the bereaved through various stages of mourning and...
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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...
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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
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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...
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Isa Blagden
Cordelia outlines her reasons for living in Italy: :I love best to be an English woman, but I should like, for many reasons, to live in Italy. Physically, the climate suits me; materially, the...
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Anna Kingsford
The volume opens with the title piece, River Reeds, a simple poem about nature which compares the gifts of the poet to a river reed: however lowly and mean, both offer melodies tender and...
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Christina Rossetti
Influences that manifested themselves somewhat later in CR
's career were those of fairy tales—Perrault
, Keightley
, and later Hans Christian Andersen
—and later poets including Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, whom...
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Julia Kristeva
Again Stéphanie Delacourt and Northrop Rilsky, held tightly under the control of a third-person narrator, address themselves to mystery-solving. JK
quotes Delacourt, who revels in neologisms, taking as her motto Je me voyage (I travel...
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Janet Hamilton
Although he comments on the defects caused by a lack of classical education, and seems to rate her moral character more highly than her literary ability, Gilfillan
pronounces Hamilton's work to be of uncommon excellence...
She both wrote for it herself and edited the work of contributors. On acceptance of the work, she had only a month for complete preparation of the volume: to commission one piece each from six...
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Matilda Betham-Edwards
Helen Black questioned her closely about her preferences in literature, and learned that Betham-Edwards endeavour[ed] to appreciate all the living novelists, but found the school of Tolstoy
, Ibsen
, and Zolarepulsive in the...
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Henry James
Although HJ
is best remembered as a novelist, he was also a prolific and insightful critic of literature and the arts. Over the course of his career he reviewed many novels by British women writers...
