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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Virginia Woolf
VW published the complete Flush, her fictional autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning 's dog, with the Hogarth Press and with Harcourt Brace in America.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Hogarth Press.
2: 245
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
160
Textual Production Virginia Woolf
VW conceived her book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning 's spaniel as a little escapade, light relief after the hard slog of writing The Waves. No doubt with memories of Sackville portraits for Orlando...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Virginia Woolf
Flush is both the life-story of a dog and the life-story, obliquely told, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning . Woolf accepts the version of the poet's life that was current at the time—of her as imprisoned...
Textual Features Emma Caroline Wood
The volume included selections from Byron , George Eliot , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Christina Rossetti , Sir Walter Scott , Alfred Lord Tennyson , Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Wordsworth .
Literary responses Sarah Williams
Geraldine Jewsbury wrote a review of Twilight Hours for the Athenæum in which she describes SW 's work as promising, but unfulfilled and melancholy. The review explains that her life . . . seems to...
Literary responses Sarah Williams
A. H. Miles included a selection of SW 's work in The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century and the introduction by A. H. Japp describes her work as distinguished by originality, breadth...
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...
Friends, Associates Ella Wheeler Wilcox
EWW 's early literary activity was rewarded by a visit from an older magazine verse-writer, Helen Manville . She had a somewhat hostile relationship with another writer, James Whitcomb Riley , who criticised her for...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Julia Wedgwood
JW , in her early thirties, launched what became a flirtatious as well as a literary exchange with Browning, who was in his fifties and whose wife Elizabeth had died several years before. Scholars have...
Textual Features Augusta Webster
Like much of AW 's later poetry, this inaugural volume shows the influence of Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning , as well as earlier poets such as John Keats . Many poems here, including...
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
Intertextuality and Influence Augusta Webster
Shorter pieces include The River, Two Maidens, and The Hidden Wound. Lota, the last and longest in the collection, is a narrative poem in blank verse. It is most heavily indebted...
Literary responses Augusta Webster
Reviews were in general not very good; at least one reviewer liked Lota best..
Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
102, 119
A Saturday Review critic praised Webster's analytic power of sufficient originality,
Webster, Augusta. “Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews”. Portraits and Other Poems, edited by Christine Sutphin, Broadview, pp. 403-23.
410
while the Leader (beginning a trend) praised...
Literary responses Augusta Webster
The Athenæum declared the play would strengthen AW 's reputation as a dramatist, calling the dialogue intellectual and subtle.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2878 (1882): 841
But although the review conceded that Webster has not strangled poetic art...

Timeline

1495: In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence,...

Writing climate item

1495

In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence, Italy, Girolamo Savonarola destroyed texts by Ovid , Dante , Boccaccio and others.

: One of the best-known poems of John Skelton,...

Writing climate item

Autumn1498

One of the best-known poems of John Skelton , The Bowge of Courte, probably dates from this season. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde the following year.

27 December 1831: A major slave uprising, the Baptist War,...

National or international item

27 December 1831

A major slave uprising, the Baptist War, Christmas Rebellion, or Great Jamaican Slave Revolt, began with the setting afire of the Kensington Estate. Over the next two weeks it spread to several more parishes, causing...

20 March 1839: The Anti-Corn Law League was founded....

National or international item

20 March 1839

The Anti-Corn Law League was founded.

1845: William Edmonstoune Aytoun and Theodore Martin...

Writing climate item

1845

William Edmonstoune Aytoun and Theodore Martin published the satirical A Book of Ballads, as edited by Bon Gaultier.

11 October 1845: A translated edition of Emanuel Swedenborg's...

Building item

11 October 1845

A translated edition of Emanuel Swedenborg 's work The Principia was published in London; this form of spiritualism soon became popular in elite intellectual circles.

19 November 1845: Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven and Other...

Writing climate item

19 November 1845

Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven and Other Poems.

9 April 1855: American Daniel Dunglas Home arrived in England...

Building item

9 April 1855

American Daniel Dunglas Home arrived in England as a self-proclaimed spiritualist missionary.

December 1855: Barbara Leigh Smith, later Bodichon, founded...

National or international item

December 1855

Barbara Leigh Smith , later Bodichon, founded the Married Women's Property Committee (sometimes called the Women's Committee) to draw up a petition for a married women's property bill.

14 March 1856: A petition for Reform of the Married Women's...

National or international item

14 March 1856

A petitionfor Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, organized by the Married Women's Property Committee and signed by many prominent women, was presented to both Houses of Parliament.

16 April 1860: King Victor Emmanuel II made his triumphal...

National or international item

16 April 1860

King Victor Emmanuel II made his triumphal entry into Florence.

By 20 October 1860: Faithful for Ever, the third part of Coventry...

Writing climate item

By 20 October 1860

Faithful for Ever, the third part of Coventry Patmore 's poemThe Angel in the House, was published.

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

1868: Emily Taylor (1795-18), who is remembered...

Writing climate item

1868

Emily Taylor (1795-18), who is remembered for books connected with her school-teaching career, published Memories of some Contemporary Poets, with Selections from their Writings, with a good representation of women among her subjects (from...

1886: Eva Hope's Queens of Literature of the Victorian...

Women writers item

1886

Eva Hope 's Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era singled out Mary Somerville , Harriet Martineau , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot , and Felicia Hemans .

Texts

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems. James Duncan.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Chapman and Hall, 1857.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Editor Reynolds, Margaret, Ohio University Press, 1992.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Cora Kaplan. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Women’s Press, 1978.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Casa Guidi Windows. Chapman and Hall, 1851.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Critical Introductions”. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, AMS Press, 1973, p. Various pages.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Diary by E.B.B. Editors Kelley, Philip and Ronald Hudson, Ohio University Press, 1969.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Editorial Materials”. Casa Guidi Windows, edited by Julia Markus, Browning Institute, 1977, p. Various pages.
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Editorial Materials”. The Brownings’ Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley et al., Wedgestone Press, 1984, p. Various pages.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford. Editor Miller, Betty, John Murray, 1954.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Fragment of an ’Essay on Woman’”. Studies in Browning and His Circle, Vol.
12
, pp. 11-12.
Meynell, Alice, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Introduction”. Prometheus Bound and Other Poems, Ward, Lock and Bowden, 1896, p. v - xv.
Ricks, Christopher et al. “Introduction”. The Brownings: Letters and Poetry, International Collectors Library, 1970, pp. 1-29.
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, 1973, pp. xi - xxiv; 175.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Last Poems. Editor Browning, Robert, Chapman and Hall, 1862.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Richard Hengist Horne. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne. Editor Mayer, S. R. Townshend, R. Bentley, 1877.
Ogilvy, Eliza, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Memoir”. The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frederick Warne, 1893.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Note”. Aurora Leigh, Smith, Elder, 1898, p. vii - xiv.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems. Edward Moxon, 1844.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems. Chapman and Hall, 1850.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems Before Congress. Chapman and Hall, 1860.
Æschylus,. Prometheus Bound. Translator Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, A. J. Valpy, 1833.
Ogilvy, Eliza, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Recollections”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, edited by Peter N. Heydon et al., Quadrangle, 1973, p. xxv - xxxv.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. Poems, New ed., Chapman and Hall, 1850.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Battle of Marathon. Printed for W. Lindsell, 1820.