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.
It has been speculated that Lytton and IB
were romantically attached.
Raymond, William O. “Our Lady of Bellosguardo: A Pastel Portrait”. University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol.
xii
, 1943, pp. 446-63.
449
Browning, Robert, and Isa Blagden. “Introduction”. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, edited by Edward C. McAleer, Greenwood Press, 1970, p. xix - xxxiii.
xxviii
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, among others, identified IB
as Cordelia in Robert Lytton's poem Warnings and as the heroine of his verse-novel Lucile.
Browning, Robert, and Isa Blagden. “Introduction”. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, edited by Edward C. McAleer, Greenwood Press, 1970, p. xix - xxxiii.
xxviii
Raymond, William O. “Our Lady of Bellosguardo: A Pastel Portrait”. University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol.
xii
, 1943, pp. 446-63.
451
Friends, Associates
Isa Blagden
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
had a valuable friend in IB
, who nursed Elizabeth in Florence until her death on 29 June 1861, and continued afterwards to help in the upbringing of the Brownings' son, Pen
.
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.
Browning, Robert, and Isa Blagden. “Introduction”. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, edited by Edward C. McAleer, Greenwood Press, 1970, p. xix - xxxiii.
IB
supported herself in large part through her writing. Discouraged about the financial insecurity of a writing career, she had considered becoming a professional teacher or nurse, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning
encouraged her to pursue...
Textual Features
Isa Blagden
Cordelia outlines her reasons for living in Italy: :I love best to be an English woman, but I should like, for many reasons, to live in Italy. Physically, the climate suits me; materially, the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isa Blagden
The final line invokes Wordsworth
's The Female Vagrant, andIB
also echoes Thomas Hood
's Bridge of Sighs and the more general iconography of the fallen woman. This treatment of what it meant...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isa Blagden
To George Sand
: On Her Interview with Elizabeth Barrett Browning contrasts the two poets and their work. IB
represents Barrett Browning as a paragon of stainless femininity, Sand as a fettered maniac with a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mathilde Blind
The Ascent of Man gathers together a number of longer and shorter poems (written with immense energy in varying metres), but through the whole runs the theme of human life springing from a struggle for...
Author summary
Mathilde Blind
MB
was one of the leading poets of the later nineteenth century; her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work. Her poetry combines great beauty of sound...
Literary responses
Mathilde Blind
Reviewers loved this volume. They praised MB
's power of characterisation in The Prophecy of St Oran, the sonorous beauty of her lines
qtd. in
Blind, Mathilde. The Ascent of Man. Chatto and Windus, 1889.
2
combined with simple and straightforward vocabulary, her dramatic power, and...
Literary responses
Mathilde Blind
This poem was greeted with a chorus of warm though not unqualified journalistic praise. The Athenæum called it one of the most noticeable and moving poems which recent years have added to our shelves.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
3064 (17 July 1886): 76
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Boulger
Dorothy's sister Alice Havers
, three years younger, became an illustrator of books who worked on writings by DB
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, among others.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Mary Russell Mitford
discussed it in an exchange of letters. While Mitford thought...
Textual Production
Muriel Box
MB
wrote poetry during adolescence, stopped writing it during her first marriage, and began again when that ended. She suspected that either acute stress or intense happiness was necessary for her to produce it.
Box, Muriel. Odd Woman Out. Leslie Frewin, 1974.
prelims
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.
