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.
Such verse would now be called political, in that it challenges accepted power structures. CR
also produced such poems as A Royal Princess (in which the daughter of a repressive king goes down to face...
Textual Features
Eleanor Farjeon
They are highly derivative in style (from most of the standard poetical canon including Elizabeth Barrett Browning
), though The Japanese Fan shows the whimsical lightness of EF
's mature work. This poem describes a...
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Annie S. Swan
The indices to its bound volumes list both tales and serial tales without naming the authors—even though, as named on the pages where their work actually appears, they include such luminaries as Robert Buchanan
and...
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Augusta Webster
The volume also includes several poems about shipwrecks and drownings, likely a reflection of AW
's nautical childhood. The Bitter Knight, Cruel Agnes, and Edith deploy traditional refrains in ways reminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The other poems in the collection touch on the Crystal Palace (recently moved to its permanent home in Sydenham just south of London), Emanuel Swedenborg
, and MCH
's father, Joseph Hume
.
Hume, Mary Catherine. Normiton. J. W. Parker and Son.
prelims
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Toni Morrison
The protagonist of the novel, Sethe, is a mother bereaved by slavery, herself a slave who ran awayfrom the ironically-named Sweet Home in Kentucky to Ohio, when the institution of slavery was nearing its...
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Eliza Ogilvy
To the Poets of the New Generation addresses a generation which seems almost a throwback to the learned hermits of ancient days, who held aloof from war and suffering, and prayed in unintelligible languages. EO
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Agnes Giberne
A dedication to the memory of her mother quotes Not lost, but gone before (the title of a story by Margaret Gatty
).
Giberne, Agnes. Beside the Waters of Comfort. Seeley.
prelims
The book takes the bereaved through various stages of mourning and...
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Emily Dickinson
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
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Anne Mozley
Wordsworth observed of her poetry anthologies in general that they mixed the contemporary with the canonical: Spenser
, Cowley
. . . stand side by side with Monckton Milnes
and Miss Barrett
.
Wordsworth, John, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, p. xii - xx.
ix
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Eliza Ogilvy
The earliest poems in the volume return to the experience of losing a child. A Remembrance, the opening poem, applies to this a most unexpected image. A ship grounds offshore, and seems about to...
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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...
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Anna Kingsford
The volume opens with the title piece, River Reeds, a simple poem about nature which compares the gifts of the poet to a river reed: however lowly and mean, both offer melodies tender and...
Residence
Mary Russell Mitford
The first period of poverty after his marriage caused him to move his family from Alresford in Hampshire. (MRM
later remembered the Hampshire countryside with warm affection, and delighted in its nearness to...
