Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
This bowdlerized version of EB
's novel and her poetry circulated widely and received many reviews. H. F. Chorley
in the Athenæum pronounced the re-publication of the two novels an illustration of English female genius...
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
Arthur Munby
, meeting JI
in early 1864, pronounced what became a commonly-held view, that she was second only to Mrs Browning
as a poetess. An unsuccessful poet himself, he was relieved of the...
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
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...
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
FH
remained continuously in print throughout the Victorian period, but her critical reputation and popularity waned before its close and died with modernism. She lingered on in popular memory as the author of popular recitation...
Literary responses
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
The future JFLW
's early verse inspired many to submit articles to the Nation.
Wyndham, Horace. Speranza. T. V. Boardman.
27-8
Charles Duffy
described her writing as a substantial force in Irish politics, the vehement will of a woman of...
Literary responses
Fanny Kemble
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
thought that Kemble's poetry was inelastic . . . unpliant to her age.
Adey, Lionel, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 32. Gale Research.
Adey, Lionel, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 32. Gale Research.
180
though they were thought serious enough for review in the...
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
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
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
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
Jessie White Mario
After the inaugural lecture, the New York Herald called her words very chaste and poetical and her enunciation clear and distinct.
Daniels, Elizabeth Adams. Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary. Ohio University Press.
75
When her thoughts turned to the Italian struggle, her brilliant eyes flashed like...
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...
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.
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...