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.
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, 1908–2025, 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...
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Florence Marryat
She dedicated it to her childhood friend and fellow popular novelist Annie Thomas Cudlip
, with the famous refrain from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's lyric My Heart and I: now we are tired—My Heart...
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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...
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Margaret Forster
MF
published a life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(the first in thirty years), which addresses the poet's responses to the nineteenth century's crushingly male, and her own limitingly middle-class, culture.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
Textual Production
Christina Rossetti
In 1856, CR
published an historical short story, The Lost Titian, in The Crayon, a small magazine published in New York.
Smulders, Sharon. Christina Rossetti Revisited. Twayne, 1996.
100
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. Viking, 1995.
176-9
. She also wrote some non-fiction on Italian writers (including...
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Henry James
Although HJ
is best remembered as a novelist, he was also a prolific and insightful critic of literature and the arts. Over the course of his career he reviewed many novels by British women writers...
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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.
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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...
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Janet Hamilton
Although he comments on the defects caused by a lack of classical education, and seems to rate her moral character more highly than her literary ability, Gilfillan
pronounces Hamilton's work to be of uncommon excellence...
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Margaret Forster
MF
published a biographical novel, Lady's Maid, whose protagonist, Elizabeth Wilson
, was the personal maid of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
155
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Jane Francesca Lady Wilde
Francesca Elgee set the tone for her correspondence with John Hilson
in her earliest surviving letter, writing your Gods are my Gods about her favourite modern living poets, Tennyson
and Elizabeth Barrett
, who...
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Caroline Frances Cornwallis
This book came out of CFC
's long held sentiment that the current treatment of children needed to be corrected.
Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. Editor Power, M. C., Trübner and Co., 1864.
202, 204-5
The Ragged School Union
had been founded in 1844 to promote education for...
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Charlotte Nooth
CN
followed her poetry volume with Eglantine; or, The Family of Fortescue, an unusual novel whose dedication to Lady Shepherd
is dated 20 July.
Lady Shepherd is presumably Lady Mary Shepherd, who published philosophical...
Jex-Blake's essay was heavily influenced by her relationship with Dr Lucy Sewall
. By her late twenties, Sewall had established a national reputation for her work as a woman doctor. SJB
also drew on a...
Timeline
1897: Artisan Phoebe Traquair completed her lavishly...
Building item
1897
Artisan Phoebe Traquair
completed her lavishly illustrated manuscript of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's Sonnets from the Portuguese.
The National Library of Scotland, where the manuscript is housed, notes that the transcriptions are from Traquair's...
19 July 1904: King Edward VII laid the foundation stone...
February 1930: D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee published...
Writing climate item
February 1930
D. B. Wyndham Lewis
and Charles Lee
published The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, which includes bad poetry by John Dryden
, John Keats
, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
along with other canonical figures.
Byatt, A. S. Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction. Editor Bell, Hazel K., University of Toronto, 2001.
110
Lewis, D. B. Wyndham et al. The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse. 2nd edition, Capricorn, 1962.
May 1975: Cora Kaplan edited the first modern anthology...
Women writers item
May 1975
Cora Kaplan
edited the first modern anthology of women's poetry in Britain: Salt and Bitter and Good: three centuries of English and American women poets, published by Paddington Press
.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1976
Texts
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Editors Kelley, Philip et al., Wedgestone Press, 1984, 14 vols. to date.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Editors Clarke, Helen A. and Charlotte Porter, AMS Press, 1973, 6 vols.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Editor Kenyon, Frederic G., Macmillan, 1897, 2 vols.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854. Editors Raymond, Meredith B. and Mary Rose Sullivan, Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, 1983, 3 vols.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Poets’ Enchiridion. Printed exclusively for members of the Bibliophile Society, 1914.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Seraphim, and Other Poems. Saunders and Otley, 1838.