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
Leisure and Society Isa Blagden
IB was fond of society life, had a wide circle of friends, and was noted for her hospitality. Her home at the Villa Brichieri, with its terraced garden overlooking Florence and the Arno, was...
Leisure and Society Mary Boyle
MB was an avid reader. Her favourite authors included Walter Landor , with whom she exchanged frequent letters, the BrowningsRobert Browning , and most especially, her literary godfather, G. P. R. James .
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
x
Leisure and Society Rumer Godden
Her literary standards of judgement were high. Among women poets she accorded major status only to Sappho , Christina Rossetti , Emily Dickinson —not Elizabeth Barrett Browning —and to the more recent Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore .
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
218 and n
Literary responses Augusta Webster
Reviews were in general not very good; at least one reviewer liked Lota best..
Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.
102, 119
A Saturday Review critic praised Webster's analytic power of sufficient originality,
Webster, Augusta. “Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews”. Portraits and Other Poems, edited by Christine Sutphin, Broadview, 2000, pp. 403-23.
410
while the Leader (beginning a trend) praised...
Literary responses Harriet Hamilton King
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.
199: 198
In the entry on HHK in...
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 Jessie White Mario
After the inaugural lecture, the New York Herald called her words very chaste and poetical and her enunciation clear and distinct.
qtd. in
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press, 1972.
75
When her thoughts turned to the Italian struggle, her brilliant eyes flashed like...
Literary responses Edna St Vincent Millay
In The NationRolfe Humphries responded with comment on the shape of her career, regretting that she had become a legend before becoming a success, that her public now included collectors as well as readers...
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 E. Nesbit
When EN asked Bernard Shaw to review the first Lays and Legends for To-Day, he responded with a pretend review contained in a letter, a masterpiece in faint praise: The author has a fair...
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 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...

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