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.
This novel retells The Husband of a Blue, a story by ESP
's mother, Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
, from the perspective of Avis Dobell, a wife, mother, and would-be artist who sacrifices her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Although written not in blank verse but in pentameter with an alternating rhyme scheme, EJP
's poem (whose topicality might well qualify it as a verse novel or a female bildungsroman) is heavily indebted to...
Education
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Her family's financial troubles prevented EJP
from receiving a formal or thorough education. In her own words, education was not within the reach of the gently born who were also poor, therefore I had little...
Residence
Frances Mary Peard
The 1881 census lists them in Tormoham (a part of Torquay): FMP
's mother was listed as the householder, and Frances Mary was listed as without occupation.
“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Torquay at the time of their arrival was...
Occupation
Coventry Patmore
Its conservative gender politics coupled with its immense popularity made The Angel in the House a target of criticism for feminists. There are oblique references to it in Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh (1857)...
Friends, Associates
Bessie Rayner Parkes
BRP
knew personally and corresponded with many of the Victorian intelligentsia. In addition to her Langham Place associates already mentioned, her literary friends and acquaintances included Matilda Hays
, Harriet Martineau
, Anthony Trollope
,...
Textual Features
Bessie Rayner Parkes
In a similar vein she writes To Elizabeth Barrett Browning, . . . I use no words Of any careful beauty, being plain As earnestness, and quiet as that Truth Which shrinks from any...
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...
death
Julia Pardoe
In her later years JP
had endured a great deal of mockery. Samuel Carter Hall
noted in his Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, from Personal Acquaintance that she was...
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
Ouida
Critic Kenneth Churchill
argues that Ouida was the first English writer to chronicle the sense of growing disillusion
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Research.
43: 376
with the practical outcomes of the new state established in Italy by the Risorgimento. She...
Reception
Ouida
Corelli took issue with the vicious reception Ouida had received, arguing that critics had read Ouida's novels in a spirit of fault-finding rather than giving the author . . . the fair chance of...
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...
Travel
Carola Oman
When Carola was twelve she was taken on her first foreign holiday, to France. Germany followed in 1912, and Italy (which made her feel like Elizabeth Barrett Browning) in 1913.
Oman, Carola. An Oxford Childhood. Hodder and Stoughton.
120, 170
Textual Production
Carola Oman
She used her married name, C. Lenanton, for Miss Barrett
's Elopement, 1929 (about the famous Browning
courtship), and "Fair stood the Wind. . .", 1930 (one of her several novels with...