Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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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
Literary responses Dora Greenwell
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 George Sand
Other British women writers also found their admiration mingled with disapprobation. Elizabeth Barrett read GS eagerly and recognised her importance, but reflected the opinion of many in often finding the writing inappropriate for a woman...
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...
Literary responses Robert Browning
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 Mary Russell Mitford
Our Village was praised by Christopher North (John Wilson) , Felicia Hemans , Elizabeth Barrett (who called Mitford here a sort of prose Crabbe in the sun
qtd. in
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2026, 22 vols. plus supplements.
and Harriet Martineau . MRM was especially gratified...
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 Bessie Rayner Parkes
Leighton and Reynolds suggest that this poem, together with Barrett Browning 's Aurora Leigh, is one of the few bold attempts to tackle the woman question in verse and it is clearly influenced by...
Literary responses Frances Ridley Havergal
The Reverend Charles Tennyson Turner offered high praise for several of FRH 's poems and noted that Miss Havergal, Sappho and Mrs Browning constitute my present female trio. There may be others lying perdues to...
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...

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