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.
Despite the popularity of HHK
's work into the twentieth century, it has not fared well critically. She has seldom been mentioned in recent critical discussions, although several of her poems are anthologized in feminist...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Reception
L. E. L.
Although LEL died on the cusp of the Victorian period, she was widely read in its early years, and was invoked explicitly by many other writers who followed her, including women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
116-17
Publishing
Amy Levy
At thirteen AL
published The Ballad of Ida Grey in the feminist journal The Pelican; an essay by her on Elizabeth Barrett
's Aurora Leigh had already appeared in the children's magazine Kind Words.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
In these straits she found her friends worse than useless; they had never experienced poverty, far less starvation. Jenny Miles
apparently reproached her with the fact that George Eliot
, Charlotte Yonge
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Catherine Crowe
, initially a friend of both JL
and her husband, stayed a while with Jane and her daughter in summer 1850, and shared her interest in spiritualism with Agnes. About four years later...
Friends, Associates
Jessie White Mario
While visiting Italy, JWM
stayed with Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
at Casa Guidi. (Years later they had an unpleasant public debate over Italian politics.) She met Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
in Rome, beginning...
death
Jessie White Mario
Her funeral procession (which passed Casa Guidi dressed in celebration of Barrett Browning
's centenary) included a handful of surviving Garibaldians, one hundred schoolgirls carrying roses, and a group of university professors.
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press.
115
She was...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jessie White Mario
She often closed her lectures by reading from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's Casa Guidi Windows.
O’Connor, Maura. The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination. St Martin’s Press.
100
Literary responses
Jessie White Mario
After the inaugural lecture, the New York Herald called her words very chaste and poetical and her enunciation clear and distinct.
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press.
75
When her thoughts turned to the Italian struggle, her brilliant eyes flashed like...
Textual Production
Florence Marryat
She dedicated it to her childhood friend and fellow popular novelist Annie Thomas Cudlip
, with the famous refrain from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's lyric My Heart and I: now we are tired—My Heart...