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.
CC
remained a close friend of her early passion Catherine Gore
.
qtd. in
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.
She was also acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford
, whom she described as priggy,
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.
FPC
's connections from home gave her introductions into the circles of US and British women living in Italy, including Harriet Hosmer
(who became a close friend). She met Elizabeth Barrett
and Robert Browning
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Power Cobbe
In treating the need for other pursuits for spinsters and widows she touches on the topical subjects of religious sisterhoods, female doctors, higher education for women, female philanthropists such as Maria Rye
, and feminist...
Textual Production
Frances Power Cobbe
It contains much statistical and economic information, as well as considerable analysis of the complex political situation and a chapter on visitors and expatriates in Italy, including a description of FPC
's impression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Phantasmion is a bildungsroman set in a fictional, somewhat oriental land, is packed with supernatural machinery
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, and Sara Coleridge. Sara Coleridge, a Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. Yale University Press, 1989.
95
and with adventure. The substantial and detailed narrative follows a young aristocratic boy from youth to adulthood, emphasizing...
Reception
Sara Coleridge
SC
's biographer Bradford Keyes Mudge, however, sees Edith's contribution less positively. He writes: having no desire to expose any part of her mother's private life, Edith
edited a two-dimensional portrait of a proper Victorian...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eliza Cook
After moving into the home of Weekly Dispatch editor James Harmer
, she became involved in a scandal (large enough to have been known to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, who wrote of it to Mary Russell Mitford
Publishing
Blanche Warre Cornish
BWC
's eccentric but unforgettable bons mots were collected in Cornishiana, a little book with an unusual publishing history. Logan Pearsall Smith
, first collector of her sayings, cast doubt on his own very...
Textual Production
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...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Mary Russell Mitford
supposed from reading this book that its author was Elizabeth Barrett Browning
.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
(9 March 1872): 298
She may, however, have been building on another's opinion, for the Athenæum reviewer found abundant...
Dedications
Dinah Mulock Craik
The Head of the Family is dedicated to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, whom DMC
designates the good influence of my life although not a personal friend.
Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Head of the Family. New, Chapman and Hall, 1878.
dedication
The New York edition was a single volume...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dinah Mulock Craik
The plot is thin for the three-volume length required by the Victorian publishing industry.
It concerns the initially young and naive Agatha, an heiress of Anglo-Indian background who marries Nathanael Harper, her trustee's younger...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dinah Mulock Craik
Despite her regular invocation of conventional gender roles, DMC
, like Felicia Hemans
before her, considers alternative views of heroic male effort in poems such as her later The Arctic Exploration: from the Woman's Side...
