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.
Mary Russell Mitford
supposed from reading this book that its author was Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(9 March 1872): 298
She may, however, have been building on another's opinion, for the Athenæum reviewer found abundant...
Literary responses
Mary Howitt
The Improvisatore was much admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
Literary responses
Jane Francesca Lady Wilde
The April 1865Dublin Review said the collection recalls . . . the awful state of the country—the corpses that were buried without coffins, and the men and women that walked the roads more like...
Literary responses
Julia Pardoe
This book was praised by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Kadar
credits Pardoe and Catherine Gore
as the first British writers to observe the modern form of nationalism that was emerging in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
The London Review was very positive, considering the writing the genuine utterance of a richly imaginative mind and of a very high order.
qtd. in
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking, 1995.
28
The Spectator talked about CR
's genius and artistic discrimination. Other...
Literary responses
Mary Russell Mitford
Elizabeth Barrett
and Robert Browning
were dismayed at the violation of their privacy (and particularly the treatment of Edward Barrett
's drowning) by MRM
's Recollections.
Taplin, Gardner B. The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yale University Press, 1957.
258
Literary responses
Ouida
Critic Kenneth Churchill
argues that Ouida was the first English writer to chronicle the sense of growing disillusion
qtd. in
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Research, 1978–2026, Numerous volumes.
43: 376
with the practical outcomes of the new state established in Italy by the Risorgimento. She...
Literary responses
Caroline Bowles
A few months after publication, The Birth-Day was read with very much pleasure by the William WordsworthWordsworth
clan.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Mary Russell Mitford
discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
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...
Literary responses
Eliza Ogilvy
One critic felt that Mrs. Ogilvy is among those who have listened too long and too submissively to Tennyson
and the BrowningsRobert Browning
.
qtd. in
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.
xviii
Literary responses
Amelia Opie
AO
's novels, which formed a comparatively minor part of her output, had an impact beyond the rest of her work. Literary historian Gary Kelly
notes that when they were new they commanded among the...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
CR
's critical reputation stood very high from the appearance of Goblin Market, although she was not a popular poet. H. Buxton Forman
in Our Living Poets, 1871, got her middle name wrong...
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, 1921, 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...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
The Spectator greeted this collection effusively as without question the most promising of any first appearance in this century, except that of Keats
, and the Saturday Review asserted, presumably with reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
Maria Jane Jewsbury
had already begun the idealisation of FH
in 1830 with her portrait of Egeria in The History of a Nonchalant: a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman—the Italy...
