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.
Wordsworth observed of her poetry anthologies in general that they mixed the contemporary with the canonical: Spenser
, Cowley
. . . stand side by side with Monckton Milnes
and Miss Barrett
.
Wordsworth, John, Bishop of Salisbury, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, 1892, p. xii - xx.
ix
Textual Features
Eliza Ogilvy
The earliest poems in the volume return to the experience of losing a child. A Remembrance, the opening poem, applies to this a most unexpected image. A ship grounds offshore, and seems about to...
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
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
Emily Dickinson
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
Textual Features
Annie S. Swan
The indices to its bound volumes list both tales and serial tales without naming the authors—even though, as named on the pages where their work actually appears, they include such luminaries as Robert Buchanan
and...
Textual Features
Isa Blagden
Cordelia outlines her reasons for living in Italy: :I love best to be an English woman, but I should like, for many reasons, to live in Italy. Physically, the climate suits me; materially, the...
She chose epigraphs to chapter one from Keats
and James Shirley
, to chapters three and fourteen from Mary Howitt
, and elsewhere from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, Percy Bysshe Shelley
, and writers in French, German, and Italian.
Textual Production
Anna Brownell Jameson
For this collection, ABJ
obtained from Elizabeth Barrett
two translations of lines from the Odyssey for one of the essays, The Xanthian Marbles.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2026, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993.
229
The collection included the essay Women's Mission and Women's Position...
Textual Production
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp
included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...
Textual Production
Sarah Flower Adams
SFA
also wrote notices for the Westminster Review. In December 1844, as S. F. A., she contributed a review of Elizabeth Barrett
's Poems.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
3: 602
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.
Textual Production
Eliza Dunlop
Nearly a decade before Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, but following William Wordsworth
's Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman and Felicia Hemans
's The Indian Woman's Lament...
