Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Robert Browning
-
Standard Name: Browning, Robert
Used Form: Z
RB
wrote thirty-one books of poetry (excluding numerous collected editions) and became the most influential practitioner of the dramatic monologue in the Victorian period. He also wrote literary criticism and two plays that were staged. His poetry's conversational phrasing, challenging syntax, quotidian imagery, and philosophical preoccupations respond to romanticism and anticipate modernism. He has become one of the most prominent among canonical Victorian poets.
Smith, Elder and Co.
of London released Agnes Tremorne in two volumes. It has been sugested that Anthony Trollope
helped get this first novel published, and that Robert Browning
may have similarly persuaded publishers to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isa Blagden
Agnes Tremorne is a fairly sentimental novel of art, misfortune, and romance set in Rome during the struggle for Italian independence in the 1830s. Agnes Tremorne—the novel's heroine and protagonist—is both a devoted nurse to...
Publishing
Isa Blagden
A letter from Browning
intimates that Frederic Chapman
paid her £170 for the novel as a bribe to him rather than as what it was worth.
qtd. in
Browning, Robert, and Isa Blagden. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden. Editor McAleer, Edward C., Greenwood Press.
288
Intertextuality and Influence
Isa Blagden
A Model and a Wife has a principal cast of three: John Herbert, a solitary English painter living in Rome in ill health; Nell Spencer, a young English heiress (once an abandoned orphan in India...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isa Blagden
The final line invokes Wordsworth
's The Female Vagrant, andIB
also echoes Thomas Hood
's Bridge of Sighs and the more general iconography of the fallen woman. This treatment of what it meant...
Publishing
Isa Blagden
After IB
's death, Linda Mazini (later Villari)
collected her poems and Alfred Austin, a friend of Isa's and later Poet Laureate, agreed to edit a selection, write a short memoir, and prepare the edition...
Browning, Robert, and Isa Blagden. “Introduction”. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, edited by Edward C. McAleer, Greenwood Press, 1970, p. xix - xxxiii.
xxiii
Leisure and Society
Isa Blagden
IB
was fond of society life, had a wide circle of friends, and was noted for her hospitality. Her home at the Villa Brichieri, with its terraced garden overlooking Florence and the Arno, was...
Friends, Associates
Isa Blagden
IB
and the Brownings became very close friends. In a letter to Isa, Elizabeth wrote: I miss you and love you. How perfect you are to me always . . . .
qtd. in
Raymond, William O. “Our Lady of Bellosguardo: A Pastel Portrait”. University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol.
xii
, 1943, pp. 446-63.
454
While he...
Literary responses
Isa Blagden
Henry James
dismissed IB
's novels as the inevitable nice novel or two of the wandering English spinster.
qtd. in
West, Rebecca. Harriet Hume. Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1982.
446
IB
's texts have received scant critical attention, and the little which has been published frequently...
Education
Marjorie Bowen
To educate herself further, she read widely, setting herself literary exercises, writing verse imitating or dramatising Chaucer
, Spenser
, and Browning
. However, she writes that at that time, I had read no really...
Textual Production
Marjorie Bowen
MB
recalls being influenced at an early age by her enjoyment of Tennyson
's Idylls of the King, Wilde
's Picture of Dorian Gray, the novels of Sir Walter Scott
, and Richardson
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
Her nephew notes that she was everywhere popular . . . due to the fact that she hated scandal and eschewed gossip.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
MB
was an avid reader. Her favourite authors included Walter Landor
, with whom she exchanged frequent letters, the BrowningsRobert Browning
, and most especially, her literary godfather, G. P. R. James
.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
Browning, Robert, and Samuel R. Gardiner. Strafford. Editor Hickey, Emily, George Bell and Sons, 1884.
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Editors Kelley, Philip et al., Wedgestone Press, 1984, 14 vols. to date.
Browning, Robert. The Ring and the Book. Smith, Elder, 1869, 4 vols.
Browning, Robert. The Ring and the Book. Editors Collins, Thomas J. and Richard D. Altick, Broadview, 2001.
