Letters ?Alive and Quivering?: Scholarly Approaches to the Brownings' Correspondence

Abstract

rT ~he edition of the complete correspondence of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which began publication in 1984, has, at the time of writing, reached its fourteenth volume. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson were the co-editors for the first eight; after Hudson's death in 1990, Scott Lewis took over as co-editor. So far, 2,716 letters have been published, covering the years 1809 to 1847; there are still fourteen years left of Elizabeth's life, forty-two of Robert's, and thousands of letters from and to them both, with new material being discovered every year by the indefatigable researchers. As well as the letters themselves, each one followed by detailed annotations, the editors append a mass of and critical apparatus: sketches of the principal correspondents, supporting documents listing other letters and papers (such as legal deeds, address books, and memoranda), contemporary reviews of the Brownings' poems, chronologies, and checklists. This is biographical and historical scholarship on the twin