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 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.
218 and n
Leisure and Society Queen Victoria
Among her favourite writers were Alfred Tennyson , Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot (whose The Mill on the Floss made a deep impression
Victoria, Queen. Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals. Editor Hibbert, Christopher, Penguin.
116
on her), and Charles Kingsley , whose Two Years Ago...
Leisure and Society Mary Russell Mitford
MRM delighted in owning dogs. Her greyhounds or spaniels accompanied her on the country walks which were one of her chief forms of recreation, and supplied innumerable stories for her letters. One beloved pet, Flush...
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.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna 's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
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 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 Mary Howitt
James Britten thought these some of MH 's best poems.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
179
Elizabeth Barrett Browning also admired the ballads.
Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. University of Chicago Press.
90
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 Harriet Martineau
HM was highly regarded by many other women writers of her day. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pronounced her the most manlike woman in the three kingdoms (that is, in England, Scotland, and Ireland)...
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 Mary Howitt
Mary Russell Mitford confided to Elizabeth Barrett , who had been charmed by The Neighbours, that she thought the translations' lack of popularity a sign of the poor taste of English novel-readers. Ah! dearest...
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.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking.
28
The Spectator talked about CR 's genius and artistic discrimination. Other...
Literary responses Maria Jane Jewsbury
Following her untimely death, writers such as Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed regret that the extraordinary powers of MJJ 's mind (particularly remarkable, said Barrett Browning, in a woman) had failed to produce...
Literary responses Caroline Bowles
A few months after publication, The Birth-Day was read with very much pleasure by the William WordsworthWordsworth clan.
Blain, Virginia. Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786-1854. Ashgate.
122
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
Literary responses Mary Howitt
The Improvisatore was much admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning .
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.

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