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.
Eric Robertson
in English Poetesses, 1883, suggested that HHK
's writings excelled those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
on the same topic in their truth and spontaneity.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
The Athenæum reviewer predicted a career of continued success for DG
: her present is full of promise, her future full of hope. . . . Let her only get more experience into fewer words...
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...
Literary responses
Una Marson
A review in the Jamaica Times described UM
as a fine talent
qtd. in
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press, 1998.
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, 1998.
41
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The first Dictionary of National Biography praised AW
's abilities as a poet and claimed a lasting place for her in the English poetic tradition, but by 1914 Watts-Dunton was complaining about her exclusion from...
This series was at least the catalyst for the first direct contact between RB
and his future wife, Elizabeth Barrett
, since she praised it in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, which she included in her...
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
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
Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC
's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans
or Caroline Norton
. It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...
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
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, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
Literary responses
Mathilde Blind
Reviewers loved this volume. They praised MB
's power of characterisation in The Prophecy of St Oran, the sonorous beauty of her lines
qtd. in
Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. Chatto and Windus, 1889.
2
combined with simple and straightforward vocabulary, her dramatic power, and...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
disliked The Lowest Room, believing it too much influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's falsetto muscularity.
qtd. in
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking, 1995.
